2012 was a crappy year for riding

I tallied my annual BMW motorcycle mileage this evening and am embarrassed and depressed.

I only rode 5,198 miles in 2012 – the lowest mileage since I started keeping records in 1986. I haven’t qualified for the Indianapolis BMW Club’s 10,000-mile award since 2004.

WTF?

I only made it to two rallies in ‘12 – the European Riders Rally in June in southeastern Kentucky and the BMW MOA rally in July in Sedalia, Mo. – both of them less than a day’s ride from home. And I rode up to Indianapolis in August with Charlie Parsons for MotoGP.

I had hoped to make it to the Falling Leaf Rally in Potosi, Mo. in October, but stayed home because of a rainy forecast.

It is my fervent hope that I can make up for lost time in 2013. There are lots of possibilities, starting with Daytona Beach Bike Week, the BMW RA rally at the Biltmore in Asheville, N.C., and the BMW MOA Rally in Salem, Ore. Throw in the Euro Riders Rally, the new Return to Shiloh Rally venue, and Falling Leaf and I could have a pretty good year.

At last, I have something to be optimistic about.

Happy New Year and good luck

I’m looking forward to 2013 with dread.

All of my optimism drained away on election night when it became apparent that the forces of evil had stolen the election through massive voter fraud.

Now they will move to consolidate their power and, as the past year has shown, we can’t even count on the Supreme Court to protect and defend the Constitution and us with it.

I’d like to hope for a miracle, but I fear we are truly fucked.

Front door panorama

Shot from our front porch at 9:57 a.m. It’s now 1:18 p.m. and a significant amount of snow has melted, revealing large patches of bare ground.

This was shot with the panorama feature of my new iPhone 5, which impresses the hell out of me. The embedded specs are ISO 50, 1/1500 sec. at f/2.4. This is a significantly better result than I can get with the panorama feature of my Olympus Stylus 850SW point-and-shoot that I carry as a matter of routine. Looks like I can start leaving the Olympus at home.

New phones for everyone in the house

Maria, her daughter Morgan and I were long overdue for new phones.

Morgan’s phone fell apart yesterday at work and had to be taped back together. She’s been using that phone since she was a student at Indiana University.

Maria got her phone shortly after we arrived in Arkansas five years ago and mine was only slightly newer.

Since we’re all on the same Sprint account, we rendezvoused at the Sprint store this morning, decided we all wanted cool smartphones and ended up buying three iPhone 5 phones. Maria and Morgan got white 16GB models and I got the black 32GB.

Photographic thoughts

I returned to JPG Magazine (jpgmag.com) a few days ago to share some of the photos I’ve been taking lately.

That’s what an attention whore does, you know. Put stuff out there and hope people will say nice things about it.

The feedback has been pretty good, but I’ve noticed something.

A lot of the contributions remind me of stuff I shot in my 20s when I had a camera and lenses but no idea what to point them at. I must have shot a million frames of crap – fortunately I was buying my black and white film in bulk and processing it myself.

An awful lot of the contributions to JPG Magazine online are themes I thought were cool when I was in my 20s and didn’t know shit about life. Stuff like:

• Flowers
• Abandoned buildings
• Young people looking pensive and pretending to have profound thoughts
• Abandoned cars
• Cemeteries, especially statuary
• Alleys in cities
• Bare trees
• Still lifes
• Detail shots of cars, trucks, motorcycles, etc.
• Public restrooms
• People with tattoos and/or piercings
• Grizzled looking old people
• Homeless people
• Rusty objects or things in decay (youth has a fascination with decay and death)

With a few happy exceptions, I don’t think I started taking decent pictures until the late 1990s when I bought a Nikon N90S to keep up with Maria, who had also become a Nikon shooter. Maybe I’m still not taking good pictures, but I’m having a lot of fun. Much of the time, it feels like magic happens when I start shooting and the addition of HDR has added a whole new dimension of creative possibilities.

Most of the photos I like are of people and animals doing things. I don’t know why. They just appeal to me as moments frozen in time. I don’t pretend they’re art.

You can find my stuff at jpgmag.com under johnmflora.

Oot and aboot

I’m at Panera this morning, having a cup of coffee and a free cheese Danish (courtesy of the My Panera program).

There was freezing rain in the forecast early this morning, but the rain didn’t get here until just a few minutes ago. The temperature is up to 35, so the net effect will be to hasten the snow melting as long as it stays above freezing.

No weekend plans and nothing on my agenda today beyond picking up a prescription from the Walmart pharmacy.

Just sayin’

We went to several Arkansas State University home basketball games the first three years we lived here and, while I was filling in as a staff photographer, I covered nearly all of the home games from late December, 2007 through February, 2008.

Having lived most of my life in Indiana, where basketball is the premiere sport and the Big Ten is the only conference that counts, I was used to watching college basketball played and coached at a very high level.

It didn’t take me long to notice that ASU and the Sun Belt conference don’t play the same kind of basketball that you find at Indiana University or Purdue University.

I often joke that on any given night there are probably three or four Indiana high school teams that could beat a Sun Belt team.

So I was interested the other night to see how the Sun Belt Conference’s Florida Atlantic would fare against I.U.

Indiana won 88-52 over the Florida Atlantic team that beat ASU 72-65 back on Dec. 1.

But then basketball isn’t a big deal around here. If you don’t believe it, look at the tiny high school gyms here and then visit Indiana high schools. Indiana has 13 of the 15 largest high school gyms in the nation, including the spectacular New Castle High School gym that seats 9,325. That’s only slightly smaller than the ASU Convocation Center which seats 10,563 for basketball.

No, this is the South and football is the favored sport.

And when it comes to football, ASU just might be able to beat I.U.

I’ve got to admit it’s getting better…

I stayed hunkered down at home most of today, whipping up a pot of chili for lunch, and settling a dog dispute over a hapless bird that got trapped on our screened porch.

I responded to serious barking and snarling to find Jack with a dead bird in his mouth and Samantha, the American bulldog, glaring at him for taking her prize. Sam dreams of catching birds and sits under the bird feeder, a picture of comical optimism.

I chased Jack around the yard for awhile – which is what he wanted me to do - trying to get him to surrender the dead bird before he ate it. I finally distracted him and snatched it up, tossing it over the fence and out of his reach.

Thinking I might see something worth photographing, I took my camera with me when I went to the post office in mid-afternoon. I stopped at the Dollar General to restock Maria’s supply of Coke Zero 2-liter bottles and as I prepared to get back onto the highway, I noticed this Arkansas State Highway and Transportation Department grader northbound on U.S. 49. So I shot a bunch of frames and sent one downtown for possible use in the paper. The driver, just for the record, was Heath Eubanks with the department’s Greene County maintenance crew.

Our little subdivision county road, on the other hand, isn’t likely to get plowed or graded before the sun makes the snow disappear. That’s the most common form of Arkansas snow removal.

Learning, learning…

It’s a sunny 36 degrees and the 5” of snow from last night’s blizzard is rapidly turning to slush, so I decided to see how the Lexus could handle our unplowed subdivision streets.

I promptly got stuck at the end of our driveway, a gentle uphill right turn.

Then I noticed the button to the left of the shifter marked ECT SNOW. Out came the inch-thick owner’s manual and I quickly learned that there is an ECT light on the instrument panel that confirms when the ECT mechanism is engaged.

Our ‘03 Lexus RX330 is front wheel drive, so I knew there was no chance of ECT involving 4WD.

That in mind, I pushed the button, checked the ECT light on the dash and gingerly applied pressure to the accelerator. Voila! The car moved forward and never faltered over the 2/10 mile of snow and slush between our house and the well-plowed county road.

Online research later informed me that ECT minimizes wheelspin by starting off in second gear and making the accelerator a little less responsive to foot pressure.

Hardly 4WD or all-wheel drive, but it worked and spared me some embarrassment.

Yeah, it snowed

The Blizzard of ‘12 is gone and I measured 5” of snow in our driveway just now. There are drifts of 10”-12” in places.

It was snowing hard – hard enough to create the rare phenomenon of thunder snow – by the time we crept home in the all-wheel drive Subaru Forester around 9:30 p.m. We only met about a dozen vehicles on our drive and saw no one going north in front of us or behind us.

This may have been a spectacular weather event by Arkansas standards. As a veteran of 62 Indiana winters, I look at it as just another snowstorm.

The big difference, of course, is that snowfall of an inch or more is so uncommon that it would be foolish for state, county and city officials to invest in snowplows. I’m told that this county has two.

So the strategy is for everyone to just stay put for a day or two until it melts.

Forget the Mayans, we’re stuck in the middle of Kali Yuga

Just in case you thought we were off the hook since the world didn’t end on the 21st.

Merry Christmas. Here comes a blizzard.

I’m driving Maria to work and carrying a camera in case she needs another shooter. Early deadlines, so we hope to get home before the roads drift over – only two snowplows in the county. But we’re taking sleeping bags and air mattresses just in case.

From the National Weather Service office in Memphis:

Updated Dec 25, 2012, 9:30am CST

... BLIZZARD WARNING IN EFFECT FROM 3 PM THIS AFTERNOON TO 9 AM CST WEDNESDAY... ... WINTER STORM WARNING IS CANCELLED...

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN MEMPHIS HAS ISSUED A BLIZZARD WARNING... WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM 3 PM THIS AFTERNOON TO 9 AM CST WEDNESDAY. THE WINTER STORM WARNING HAS BEEN CANCELLED.

* VISIBILITIES AT TIMES DOWN TO LESS THAN A QUARTER OF A MILE.

* SNOW ACCUMULATIONS... 6 TO 10 INCHES... WITH LOCALLY HIGHER AMOUNTS.

* TIMING... RAIN WILL CHANGE OVER TO SNOW THIS AFTERNOON AND INTO THE EARLY EVENING HOURS. SNOW WILL BECOME HEAVY AT TIMES TONIGHT.

* WINDS... SUSTAINED WINDS AROUND 25 TO 30 MPH WITH GUSTS OF 35 TO 45 MPH.

* IMPACTS... SNOW AND BLOWING SNOW WILL SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCE VISIBILITIES. TRAVEL WILL BECOME HAZARDOUS.

.PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...

A BLIZZARD WARNING MEANS SEVERE WINTER WEATHER CONDITIONS ARE EXPECTED OR OCCURRING. FALLING AND BLOWING SNOW WITH STRONG WINDS AND POOR VISIBILITIES ARE LIKELY. THIS WILL LEAD TO WHITEOUT CONDITIONS... MAKING TRAVEL EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. DO NOT TRAVEL. IF YOU MUST TRAVEL... HAVE A WINTER SURVIVAL KIT WITH YOU. IF YOU GET STRANDED... STAY WITH YOUR VEHICLE.

&&

More Information

... BLIZZARD CONDITIONS EXPECTED TO IMPACT PARTS OF THE MIDSOUTH FROM LATE TODAY... THROUGH CHRISTMAS NIGHT AND INTO EARLY WEDNESDAY...

.A STRONG UPPER LEVEL LOW PRESSURE SYSTEM CURRENTLY ACROSS TEXAS WILL TRACK INTO THE MIDSOUTH BY THIS EVENING. RAIN WILL SPREAD OVER MOST OF THE MIDSOUTH THIS MORNING AND AFTERNOON. RAIN WILL BEGIN TO CHANGE TO SNOW OVER NORTHEAST ARKANSAS AND THE MISSOURI BOOTHEEL LATE THIS AFTERNOON... BEFORE CHANGING OVER TO ALL SNOW BY EARLY EVENING. PERIODS OF HEAVY SNOW WILL BE POSSIBLE DURING THE NIGHT WITH THE ADDED POSSIBILITY OF AN INITIAL ICE PELLET MIX. IN ADDITIONAL TO THE HEAVY SNOW... STRONG NORTH WINDS GUSTING UP TO 45 MPH ARE EXPECTED... CAUSING SEVERE REDUCTIONS IN VISIBILITIES... ALONG WITH BLOWING AND DRIFTING CONDITIONS.

Flashback

I was searching for another photo this morning when I came across this shot of me at work in The Indianapolis News city room, circa 1967, while the ceiling got a fresh coat of paint.

Pay attention

Apparently the folks at Beck’s got complaints from beefwits who can’t tell a twist-off cap from a pry-off cap.

So they tell you on the cap so you can avoid shredded fingers.

My son Sean once opined there is no such thing as a twist-off cap. That approach saves you a lot of pain.

Opinions

I achieved a minor milestone of sorts this week.

I reached the rank of Top Contributor on tripadvisor.com, a site that invites customer reviews of hotels, motels, restaurants, tourist attractions, etc.

You have to write 50+ reviews to reach the exalted level of Top Contributor – the highest level of travel commentary on the site. Until this week, I was merely a Senior Contributor.

It wasn’t hard. All you have to do is have opinions.

Almost over

What better way to mark the end of the Mayan calendar than with Leinenkugel Snowdrift Vanilla Porter in my Mayan calendar-themed Boscos mug?

With less than three hours left of 12.21.12, it looks like we’re gonna make it.

Good work, Sandra!

I got this in an email from my mother-in-law this morning:

I almost got phone scammed ten minutes ago by a man pretending to be Austin.  I should have known when he pitifully said "Grandma is this you?" and I said "Austin?" which is how it works.

Austin would never call me Grandma.  But it went on a minute or so with some outrageous story that he wanted kept "just between you and me."  Then the light bulb went on (Duh) and I said "Austin Honey, what is your mother's name?"

Silence.

Close call, but I think even on a bad day I would have come to when he asked for money sent to his account.   I would never do that.

The scammer usually poses as a grandchild who desperately needs money to get out of jail or some other predicament.

Good job shutting him down, Sandra!

Extra points

My stepdaughter, who is a world class couponer, alerted me last week to this trick to get an extra 10 points for every bottle cap code you enter on mycokerewards.com, a site where Coca-Cola products consumers can earn prizes.

The prizes are mostly cheap and cheesy, but we keep piling up points because we’re heavy users of Coke Zero.

Here’s how it works:

1. Log into your MCR account
2. Enter a Cap code (just one!)
3. Then, enter the code GIFT – you should receive 3 points PLUS 10 bonus points = 13 total points
4. Sign out of your account and then sign back in again
5. Repeat steps 2 thru 4 continually until you run out of caps or until you’ve entered the weekly max of 40 caps (ex. 120 non-bonus points)

Oh, hell yes!

Make mine a 1911 with Crimson Trace laser sights.

Buca! Buca! Buca!

At Buca di Beppo in Orlando, moments before the best meal of the trip showed up on our table.

(Well, the name of the blog tells you who this is all about.)

On the pier

Here I am on the pier at Flagler Beach, waiting for a good surfer shot.

Under the pier

Those Flagler Beach, Fla., images are a gift that just keeps on giving. I had no idea this shot could look this evocative in HDR.

What’s up with that?

Looking through photos from our Florida trip this afternoon, I noticed the two women in the background of this shot from the France pavilion at Epcot.

Here I am, sipping a substandard mocha latte from the Boulangerie in the background, completely unaware that two women behind me are making strange faces.

Sometimes the best stuff in a photo is in the background.

Leaf-O-Rama

Looks like most of the leaves are on the ground. Now, if we can just have a few days of dry weather, I can do something about them.

Flagler Beach surfers revisited

Here’s a spectacular shot Maria made from the Flagler Beach pier. There’s more context in her pictures and the late afternoon light illuminating the waves gives them an amazing texture.

He’s tall

Jack the Nipper is tall enough to peer over the chain link fence in the back yard.

Monster

Insight from velociworld.com:

 

What transpired in Newtown, Connecticut today beggars belief. I've been through Newtown as a college student, and Norman Rockwell could not have painted a more exquisite little hamlet. But this would be a howling tragedy in Compton, or Detroit, as well. Slaughtering toddlers, children, is so especially heinous as to cause all of us to take a moment, and grieve for our imperfect species. History is replete with our ability, and often our tendency, to be monsters. But to shoot one's mother in the face, and then slaughter her kindergarten class? I don't know what to say about that.
Forget the political poseurs. They will be, and are, raising their needy heads. I have no desire to enter the fray of gun-free-zones versus heat-packing librarians. I've eaten herring before, and did not particularly care for it.
What we do have, however, is a seriously psychotic individual acting out a rage that is incomprehensible to the vast majority of us. Shooting toddlers. Someone, somewhere, brought this upon this village. I find it inconceivable that this fellow awakened this morning and thought for the first time Today is the day I go berserker.
Again, I do not see this as a gun issue. It is a crazy people issue. I have no facts, I am intuiting here, but I would wager this young fiend, who is by various descriptions autistic, Asbergian, schizophrenic, has a well-documented history of aberrant, dangerous behavior. I am by no means casting aspersions on the autistic. I have friends with autistic children. It is a heart-rending challenge, but it is by no means this. This is something else entirely.
No, there are some dead kittens quietly buried, some violently aggressive behaviors salted away, some red flags screaming Institutionalize this young man! that we, as family members, as community members, are often too loathe to do. We are historically a nation of fixers. We think we can fix that bad hatchling. Also, of late, we are a nation of cringers. We cannot summon the spine to do what sometimes must be done. We have deinstitutionalized every mentally ill person in the nation, to prowl the streets and haunt our commutes. To defecate in our common areas, and terrify our children. Our sense of compassion is noble, but most certainly displaced.
I'm not so much a believer in Good and Evil as I am in Biology. Mother Nature often gives birth to some troublesome mistakes. If you don't believe me visit a Ripley's museum. It's relatively easy to repair a cleft palate. It's not so easy to fix cleft souls. They are harder to detect, and as impossible as quicksilver to get one's hands on. But they indicate, as the medicos say. The flags go up. The shots are sent with regularity across the bow. The question is how do we deal with these indicators as a society?
We are often mocked in the South for locking our crazy aunts in the attic. My family didn't, but I can think of one or two who should have been. There's a good reason you lock the crazy aunt in the attic. I would posit there's a good reason that crazy half uncle never returned from that hunting excursion. If I'm a rancher and my cow gives birth to a two-headed calf I'll either 1) parade it around for money or 2) asphyxiate it. I'm not going to leave it with the herd and pretend it's okay. Because it's not. It's eventually going to kill itself because the one body struggles with satisfying two competing brains. It's cruel to treat it normally.
I figure this Lanza fellow was like that calf. Mom and Dad certainly couldn't parade his abnormalities around for money, but they refused to institutionalize him. And eventually those two minds had had enough. Tough love is a hard thing. I'm glad I've never had to make such choices. I would probably flagellate myself senseless if I institutionalized my child. But I'd sleep like a baby compared to what I would feel if my child had done this thing we witnessed today. That, of course, is assuming I wasn't the first one killed, like Mom.

PGR mission shaping up

The crazies from the Westboro Baptist Church have announced they will go to Newtowon, CT to demonstrate at the funerals of the victims of this week’s massacre.

Seems they want to celebrate God’s judgment on those poor kids and their teachers.

This could be the mother of all Patriot Guard Riders missions. Google maps says it’s 1,203 miles from here to Newtown. Hmmmmm.

I’m gonna be sad when this goes away

This is the smoothest porter I’ve ever tasted. I brought a 12-pack home from Indiana last month and gave the last one to a friend the other day.

The liquor store just across the county line doesn’t have it, but I found it this afternoon at Mr. T’s Riverside, just across the state line in Missouri.

Leinenkugel plans to offer it through Feb. 1.

I knew it looked familiar

One of the projects on an episode of American Restoration last night was a 1940s Taylor Tot stroller.

The more I looked at it, the surer I was that my parents had one when I was little.

I delved into the archives this evening and found this photo of me pulling a wheelie on an identical Taylor Tot stroller in the back yard of our house at 609 E. Franklin Street in Delphi, Indiana, circa 1947.

The one on the TV show was turquoise. I have no idea what color mine was, but turquoise is a good bet.

Mom and me out for a stroll.

The view from my hammock

Too cold here. I’m ready for more Florida.

You’ll never guess

Guess What This Is? And don't peek right away!!

Hint: picture was taken in 1956...
Answer below...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

***
It's a hard disk drive back in 1956 ... With 5 MB of storage.
In September 1956 IBM launched the 305 RAMAC, the first 'SUPER' computer with a hard disk drive (HDD).
The HDD weighed over a ton and stored a 'whopping' 5 MB of data.
Do you appreciate your 8 GB memory stick a little more now?

Pete continues to bring happiness to others

Our beloved Pete, who left us just before Thanksgiving when his liver gave out, is the gift who keeps on giving.

I got an email from CafePress.com this evening saying they were depositing about $26 in my PayPal account from the sale of items with Pete's face.

I created a storefront on CafePress a couple of years ago with Pete's picture and the words "Aussies Rule!" and then promptly forgot about it.

I can't tell you how good it makes me feel to know Pete's face is making people happy on t-shirts, throw pillows, steins and other stuff. You can see it at http://www.cafepress.com/bucksnortproductions/7317420
But don't take this as a sales pitch. It's just me missing Pete.

I also created a line of products with this image:

Here’s Pete and me with a tote bag in his likeness:

An amusing possibility

We stopped for a late lunch at a family restaurant – a western-themed steakhouse – in Alabama, en route home from Florida on Friday.

Before we left, I visited the Cowboys’ room and noticed (how could I not notice?) little flat-screen TVs over the urinals playing football highlights.

I’ve seen advertising placards and newspaper sports pages posted at urinal eye level in restaurants before, but never TVs.

Given the general level of homophobia – real or feigned – among American males, it occurred to me that it would be amusing to alter the programming so that whenever both urinals were in simultaneous use, after say 5 seconds, the video would change abruptly from manly sports content to gay porn.

I expect the scramble to zip up and get out the door would be hilarious.

Margarita brainfreeze in paradise

Here I am experiencing a frozen Margarita brainfreeze at The Fountains in Orlando, Fla., last Thursday noon. That’s a layer of Grand Marnier on the bottom of the glass. Mmmmmmmmouch.

There are the trip stats, mostly so I can reference them later:

We left about 9 a.m. on Saturday and returned about 10:45 p.m. the following Friday.

• Total Miles: 2,173
• Maximum Speed: 83 mph
• Time spent moving: 38 hours, 10 minutes
• Average speed (while moving): 57 mph

A case of mistaken identity

We were having a late lunch yesterday when the little boy in the booth behind me decided I might be Santa Claus. He kept staring, despite his parents’ embarrassment. We assured them we didn’t mind.

Now, we’re off to the Reindeer Games.

The fisherman’s son

Maria gets credit for this shot of a fisherman’s son, crashed out on the Flagler Beach Pier.

She noticed the boy and I took a few shots, then she grabbed the camera and got down low for this superior photo.

I love the way the HDR brings out the texture of the weathered wood.

The bird is the word

I noticed this bird on the Flagler Pier railing as I was photographing surfers last Wednesday. Not sure if he’s a surfin’ bird or not.

And then there were these shots:

Still exploring vacation images

This guy and a friend were working the surf south of the Flagler Beach Pier on Wednesday afternoon.

Where we were

The morning view from our bedroom window at The Fountains in Orlando.

Home and playing with images

We left Orlando about 7:30 a.m. EST and arrived at home about 10:45 p.m. CST. It was a long-ass day in the Lexus, but we got it done and saved the expense of a motel a few hours from home.

And now I can play with the images we shot. I got very lucky with the golden light of late afternoon Wednesday at Flagler Beach where a bunch of boys were surfing right next to the Flagler Pier.

I was using a Nikon D200 with a Nikkor 80-200 mm f/2.8 lens. I had the camera set for ISO 200 and aperture priority with the lens wide open, which yielded shutter speeds in the 1/1000 and 1/2000 range. The result was magic – the best surfing shots I’ve ever done.

And since I shot everything in camera RAW format, I can use my HDR software to create images like this.

Vacation report

The view from the hammock.

Followed by margaritas at poolside.

Thursday morning report

We drove back to the Atlantic coast yesterday. The first stop was BMW Motorcycles of Orlando where I bought a couple of t-shirts. Then we went on a quest for German food. The German restaurant on A1A where I dined with Indianapolis BMW Club friends during Bike Week in 1993 is still there but they don’t serve lunch on Wednesdays.

So we asked Garmin to find us another German restaurant and it took us to a mall across from the Daytona Speedway where we finally located Mr. Dunderbak’s, a quirky little bistro that served us the toughest schnitzel I’ve ever wrestled with.

We cruised up to Palm Coast and the Byrd’s Nest Quilt Shop and some Baskin-Robbins ice cream.

The sun sets early here this time of year, so we gambled that we’d have some golden light just before sunset down at Flagler Beach. The surf was up, the kids were surfing, and the light was perfect for about 15 minutes. We each shot about 330 images and this is one of my favorites.

Returning to Orlando, we gave Garmin one more chance to find us good food and this time it came through with a Mexican restaurant called El Patron. Maria had the tacos carnitas and I had the enchilada suizas. Both were spectacular and we brought home leftovers for today’s lunch.

Real height vs. the illusion of height

If you know me, you know I have serious acrophobia – fear of heights. So the warning signs at Soarin’, the premiere new ride at EPCOT, telling people who have a fear of heights to avoid the ride, had me a bit worried as we shuffled along in line for 25 minutes.

I needn’t have worried. Even though the ride hoists you some 40 feet up and into a wrap-around, 360-degree projection screen, I had no sense that I was any great distance off of the floor. To my nervous system, it seems there is a big difference between actual height and the illusion of height. And this was pure illusion.

It was great fun swooping and banking through California’s most scenic spots, but a huge letdown when the ride ended after only 4 minutes and 30 seconds. WTF?

Checking EPCOT off of the to-do list

We got to EPCOT shortly after the gates opened at 9 a.m. and went immediately to the premiere ride, Soarin’, which simulates a hang glider flight over the most scenic parts of California. The wait for the ride on some days can be 5 hours. Five freaking hours for a 4 minute 30 second ride. It was fun, but hardly worth five hours in line. I’m glad we were able to do it with only 25 minutes in line.

This was my third visit to EPCOT. I was here with my kids the first Christmas it was open (1982) and again in 1994. I wanted Maria to see it, so we went today. I don’t need to see it again.

We walked all over the place and finally staggered back to the car in the parking lot about 2:30 p.m.

Dinner was fabulous leftovers from last night’s visit to Buca di Beppo.

Breakfast on the balcony

We’re on our 7th floor balcony with fruit parfait and coffee, watching ducks and what I have tentatively identified as an egret down in the lake.

We’re off to EPCOT this morning. I was here when it was brand new in the early 1980s and again about 1995. It seemed shockingly dated in ‘95 and I hope it isn’t worse now. We shall see.