Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Today's my first day of vacation. Yeah, I wrote over the weekend about starting vacation, but that was the weekend. Weekends don't count as vacation. Today, Monday, is my first real day of vacation. And today, on my first real day of vacation... I worked. 🤣

Oh, I didn't work a full day. Good grief, I'd never do that. Not unless I was getting a day comped somewhere else— which I have done before. Twice this year, even! Once in March and once again later in March. 😅 But this time it was just 1 hour of work. I figured I can give the company an hour on my day off in exchange for all the flexibility I enjoy during regular workweeks.

Me feeling charitable, or reciprocal with flexibility, isn't the only reason I took a meeting and did some followup work today. It's that, as I've pointed out many times before, work doesn't stop just because I'm on vacation. Especially in sales, work doesn't stop. Customer projects keep moving forward, and frequently the deadlines are set without regard to my availability.

When that presents a big problem I push back and/or call for backup. Indeed, there was another customer meeting today I let my boss handle for me. So he's working a bit today, too— which absolutely factors in to my charitableness / reciprocity calculus. A colleague was even willing to cover this meeting for me. But I volunteered to do it myself even on a day off because, honestly, the alternative is worse.

You see, the alternative if I let this going a week or longer without touching it is not "I'll do it later, when I return," but rather, "While I'm out for a week, other people will try to do it, and they'll do something wrong and break it, so when I return I'll have to spend 3x as long fixing what's broken. Oh, and when it broke someone pressed the panic button, so now I have to join multiple status calls with managers who are demanding explanations." 😣

The weather forecast as of a few days ago was a picture of beautiful weather on tap. It'd be warm (for the season) and sunny. To read my blog earlier today grumbling about the weather and then see a forecast like this...



...With a week and a half of high temperatures in the 60s, you might say, you might say, "Quit yer bitchin'!"

Unfortunately the reality has been far different from this forecast. Each day we've started off with dark, gloomy mornings followed by afternoons with temperatures that have fallen several degrees short of these mythical 60+° numbers. Today, for example, it was just 50° outside when I drove around town at 11:30am. It probably won't get warmer than 53° today.

It's been a bit disorienting since we changed the clocks last week at the end of Daylight Saving Time. Remember, Fall Forward, Spring Back. 🤣 And I've been falling forward all week. I've been waking up early in the morning and pooping out early in the evening.

Waking up early, I don't mind so much. I mean, I'd prefer to get a bit more sleep instead of waking up at 6am. But it helps for days when I have 7am meetings— of which there were exactly too many this past week— and doesn't totally suck for slowly getting ready for 8am start days. The part that totally sucks is feeling ready for bed at 8pm.

The slightly disorienting part is the jarring change to my sense of what time it is based on sunset. For example, 10 minutes ago I would've guessed it was almost 7pm. It was only 5:25. It's been like that all week. This has happened in past years, too, of course. And its that past experience that tells me the time confusion will disappear quickly. Then I'll only have to deal with the fact that it's actually dark shortly past 5pm, if not sooner. 😣

I grew up in a neighborhood where there was a church up the hill. It wasn't right next to our house but it was a short walk away. Go up to the corner, turn left, go to the end of the cul-de-sac, then follow the walkway behind one of the houses up to the church lot. It was close enough that by the time I was 8, my younger sister and I could ride our bicycles up there. ...But not on Sundays. For even though it was a church of our religion, the religion my father had been born into and almost dedicated his life to the priesthood of, we almost never attended that church. Instead my parents took us to another church of the same faith a 20 minute car ride away.



Why didn't we attend our own neighborhood church? It was so close a child could handle the walk. Indeed, I remember occasionally seeing some of our neighbors walking to or from late Sunday morning services when the weather was nice. But we virtually never joined them. Instead we piled into the family car and drove to another church virtually nobody in our town had heard of.

This church nestled among the mature trees in our neighborhood was unusual in our town. In our town, built almost entirely by a single developer starting in the mid 1960s, all the other churches were on the main roads into/out of town. That made them easy to drive to; they were on major roads with high speed limits. But there was no weekly parade of neighborhood faithful walking to or from services, because those churches were on high-speed roads with no sidewalks— next to the strip malls. "Centrally located!" I'm sure the 1960s suburban planners touted. But their design also made them centrally isolated. Except our neighborhood's church.

"Why don't we go to the church up the hill?" I asked my parents numerous times when I was a child.

"Urrrarrughh," was my father's reply— when he'd reply at all. It was a guttural grumble, a nonverbal answering indicating that the conversation was over.

A few times my mother answered. "Your father doesn't like the way they celebrate there," she explained. "It's too modern."

"What's different— or wrong— with the way they celebrate mass?" I wondered, sometimes out loud. But usually silently, because there was low tolerance for badgering questions when I was a little kid. Keep asking after a nonverbal Urrrarrughh answer and the next answer might be a nonverbal swat with his right hand.

Now, since we did occasionally attend a service at that church, occasionally as in once every year or two, I did see how they're different. Or, rather, how they're not.

They were both Catholic churches. There's a not a huge amount of difference in how they celebrate Sunday services. The Catholic church's strong central hierarchy sees to that. When we were on vacations hundreds of miles away we could drop in to a church, and the service would be immediately familiar. Oh, the physical building might look newer or older, there might be old-fashioned wooden pews and maybe even a pipe organ; but the content of the worship was word-for-word virtually the same. The same format, the same readings, the same prayers at the same times. So what was so unacceptably different about the church up the hill?



It's too modern. That three word phrase was the only meaningful answer I heard for a dozen or more years. And yet it was also absurdly meaning-less as there was so little different between the two churches. The only nominally "modern" thing I could spot in the church we avoided is that it had a younger core of volunteer musicians who led the congregation in songs. And among the instruments they played was... gasp!... an acoustic guitar.

Nobody else played an acoustic guitar in a Catholic church. Nobody. Especially not at the totally-not-modern church my father preferred. There they played only the one instrument that was common in the time of Jesus Himself. The electric organ.

Haha, yes, I'm being tongue-in-cheek with that. But seriously, the choices of instruments was the only material difference I could spot. And as far as differences go, it was pretty darn close to immaterial. The "modern" church sang the same songs with same appropriate reverence.

Years later, decades later, I learned the truth about why my father refused to take us to the "modern" church. As you might suspect when the stated reason is so vacuous, so readily disproven by easily observed fact, the real reason is quite different from the stated one. And often the real reason is shameful for the person offering the dissembling answer to admit— which is why they dissemble and distract instead. The real reason we didn't attend the church up the hill is my father felt shame going there.


To be continued....

Phoenix Getaway travelog #8
Around town · Sun, 21 Sep 2025. 7pm

Getting a rental car usually involves a spin of the proverbial roulette wheel. The past several years I've been reserving at the "full size sedan" or "intermediate SUV" categories to avoid the worst of the econo-penalty box vehicles. Alas the result is usually an uninteresting car. The most common model I've been assigned the past few years is the Toyota Camry (read my Camry review). Number two, Toyota RAV4 (read my RAV4 review). They're good cars but bo-o-oring. (Except that one time a RAV4 implausibly got me through snow and mud on a 4x4 mountain trail.) This trip I got an interesting rental car: a Hyundai Ioniq 5 electric vehicle.



Being assigned an EV this trip wasn't a surprise. I mean, I booked the EV category. 😂 But not because I particularly wanted an EV. Frankly I've avoided booking EVs as rental cars because I don't want to have to figure out how to access charger networks without a subscription for just one fill-up. This time the EV category was way cheaper than everything else, like half the cost of an econo-penalty box and one-third a traditional intermediate SUV. My innate thriftiness won out over my dislike of having to figure out charging.

Well, I haven't had to charge it yet, but I've looked up the network info the rental agency provided and— yeesh, what an f'ing mess.

To put this in terms of filling up a traditional, gas powered car, imagine that:

• There are only about a dozen filling stations you can use spread across a major metropolitan area


• You can't just swipe a credit card at the pump, you have to download an app and create an account


• And Exxon, Shell, Valero, etc. each require a different app


• And, for you, gas is $16-20/gallon. 😡

Our phones have been on the blink. Again. Because Verizon is incompetent. And lies about it. 🤬

Several days ago, when we were traveling in Canada, both our phones suddenly couldn't find the network. We tried various forms of "turn it off, turn it on again" (airplane mode, turn off/turn on cellular network, reboot phone, etc.) but nothing seemed to work for 30 minutes. We had flashbacks to when a similar thing happened in Panama last December that took a hours to fix with the help of Verizon tech support. Fortunately when it happened last Monday our phones starting working again after about 30 minutes.

Then it happened again-again yesterday (Saturday). We were out getting lunch and shopping locally. First Hawk's phone went into "SOS" mode indicating it couldn't find any cellular network. She tried various forms of rebooting but none worked. Then about 2 hours later my phone did the same. I also tried various forms of restarting/rebooting. I even updated the software on my phone in case the glitch was related to older versions (though mine was less than 6 months old). It was all to no avail.

With Hawk's phone kaput for 3 hours and mine kaput for 1 hour, Hawk placed a call to Verizon tech support. Actually it wasn't a call, it was a chat session on their tech support portal. It went unanswered for 40 minutes.

At that point I started wondering, No response, not even a chatbot, on a chat service, for 40 minutes? Their tech support must be totally overwhelmed. That means likely this isn't just an "us" problem!

Hawk searched online and found lots of people complaining about the same problem.

Verizon, for its part, was responding that it was an "isolated" problem that affected "only a few people". The sheer number of people complaining online shot the shit out of that claim.

My phone came back online yesterday evening. Hawk's phone reconnected this morning. Is the problem solved? We're not sure. Verizon's continued downplaying of the apparently widespread outage gives us no confidence.

Canada travelog #10
Dundas, ON · Mon, 25 Aug 2025. 1pm.

Our first hiking stop today, after various snacking stops such as getting a box of Timbits, is Webster Falls. It's in the bucolic small town of Dundas outside of Hamilton.

We'd picked out a route that travels up from below to the bottom of the falls, but it turns out it's closed. Not only is it closed, the entry is full of all kids of "GTFO". Like, there's locked gate across the trail, there's no-parking signs all around the gate, "Maximum enforcement area" signs below the no-parking signs, and poison ivy all over the gate. Yes, seriously, it's like the town hired an evil druid NPC to cast a spell on the gate. So we went around to the top of the falls, where there's an official entrance.



Ah, here's the other half of why the entrance below is closed off and cursed. Here there's room for a gatehouse to collect money. Build a gravel parking lot, put a couple of electronic gate arms on it, then plop down a tool shed and put a teenager with a credit card reader in it (no cash accepted). $22.50 for the two of us to enter. For a trail that's not even 1/2 mile long. Oh, but it's good at all the parks around Hamilton for today, the teenager assured us.



We decided to get our $22.50 worth we'd hike to all the viewpoints for Webster Falls. They're not very far. The trail still works out to soemething like $25/km per person. And for that we only get partial views of the falls (see photo above) at some of these vista points.

For a partial falls view, it's pretty nice. I'll bet the full falls is amazing. Will we get to see that next? We walked around the other side, and...



...Nope!

Oh, this vista definitely reveals more of the falls. It just doesn't reveal all of the falls.

One more to go and... also nope. The third viewpoint shows less of the falls than the first two. It's a straight-on view of the falls.... but there's, like, 20 feet of forest between the edge of canyon and the fenced off trail. It's such a disappointment I didn't even bother to take a picture.

Ah, but I mentioned a fence. It's fenced off. You know what you can do with fences? You can go around them. Or over them. Or even under them.

Today I decided that going around this fence was easiest. Not that they made it easy. I had to do some balancing and hold onto the fencepost to get around the end of it. But I got around the fence. And once around the fence I could backtrack, on the opposite side of the fence, to where an old and steep but clearly visible path led down to a perch at the rim of the canyon. Would that perch offer a better view of the falls?



BOOM! Much better view. Hawk even kept watch for me in case a park ranger came along to bust me for going around the fence. Though I think the only "ranger" in the park was the bored teenager at the gate playing on his phone in between bilking visitors for $22.50 apiece.

There was only one problem. It was starting to rain.

Goddammit. In the time it took me to get down to this perfect picture-taking spot the sun had gone away, the clouds had come in, and it was starting to sprinkle.

I waited 10 minutes or so to see if the sky would clear, or at least if the dark clouds would shift away. Neither seemed to be happening. Thus since we had plans to visit multiple other falls today I packed it in on Webster Falls. I picked my way back up the steep path, followed the fence to its end near the edge of the canyon and swung around the last fence post, and walked the short distance back to the car.

Up next: Getting our $22.50 worth of parking with a two-fer at Tew Falls!

Canada travelog #2
Mississauga, ON · Sat, 23 Aug 2025. 8am.

We landed at YYZ airport (yes, that's really the IATA code for Toronto's airport) this morning at 6:43am local time. Our flight from San Francisco was just over 4.5 hours from takeoff to landing. And on this red-eye I managed to sleep pretty much the whole time. I was already nodding off before we were wheels-up at SFO and, except for being awoken by announcements on approach and falling back asleep, I basically didn't wake up until we were taxiing at YYZ. Those first class seats we sprung for sure helped.

Once off the aircraft and and in the terminal, it was the standard old airport shuttle, international style, I became familiar with years ago. Hike up ramps and escalators to a long, empty corridor. Trek seemingly a mile in that corridor, because the flight always lands at the far end from passport control. Wait in line for passport control— except with modernization in digital entry there's barely a line anymore. But the lack of wait there just means there's more wait now at baggage claim. Remember, those bags have to travel a mile from the aircraft, too! 🤣 Then collect your bags, pass the basically rubber-stamp customs check, and exit into the arrivals hall.

Once in the arrivals hall I decided to take a moment to try my luck with an ATM. I say "try my luck" because I'm still salty about getting raked by a cooked exchange rate at an airport ATM in Italy. Wise to that experience, I spotted where this Canadian ATM tried to do the same thing, asking me to confirm a bogus exchange rate. I said NO, expecting to cancel the transaction. But then a funny thing happened. I got cash.



"WTF! I said NO to cancel and they charged me anyway?" I fumed. I resolved to check my bank balance later to see how badly they raked me. Recall when this happened in Italy, there was a whopping 15% vig in addition to the €4.50 flat fee service charge. Here there was also a C$4.50 flat fee, but at least my credit union refunds such charges.

When we had some quiet time a bit later in the morning (after picking up our rental car, driving to the hotel where my brother-in-law is staying, and waiting for him to shower, dress, and meet us in the lobby to go out for breakfast together) I found another surprise. I looked up my bank balance details and saw that the transaction had gone through at the fair exchange rate.

WTF? In polite Canada you can just say "NO" to highway robbery by a bank ATM and... not get robbed?!

Chicago Trip Log #2
Downtown Chicago - Mon, 11 Aug 2025, 7pm

Today has been a day of alternating good and bad experiences. Getting to SJC airport and waiting for my flight was mellow. But then the flight was late. Then the flight was smooth enough that I even nodded off a bit... until later, when we hit turbulence as the pilot navigated around a storm. We landed in Chicago 40 minutes late... where the weather was beautiful. I was going to ride a train into the city, which would've taken over an hour including walking at both ends... but then I saw a pretty good price for a ride with Lyft. But then the driver drove past me, almost drove away while I was following after him waving my arms vigorously, and had a rotten orange peel sitting on the floor of his back seat when I got in. WTF? Oh, and the driver got lost in front of the hotel because he couldn't follow both spoken directions and a graphical map on his maps app.

All those little frustrations melted away when I saw my room.



I'm in a corner room at the Radisson Blu hotel downtown on Lakeshore East Park. I've got a walk-out balcony with views over the park.

My plan for dinner with colleagues this even got canceled due to a conflict. Now I'm kicking myself for not having packed leisure clothes. It's a warm evening, and the pool downstairs (I can see it from my balcony) looks inviting. Well, maybe I'll just grab a leisurely solo dinner at the hotel restaurant and come up here to enjoy the evening on the balcony.

Hawk and I have made hotel reservations for a trip next week. We're taking extra days off ahead of July 4. For our 6 nights in 3 different cities (we're driving) we looked first at the main brands where I have elite status and frequent guest points: Hilton, Marriott, and IHG. And out of 6 nights we booked... none of them at these hotel brands. They're all too expensive!

We saw rates of $250-300/night or higher for the areas we checked. And we're not staying in Beverly Hills or Manhattan, BTW. We're looking at roadside motels in the mountains of California and Oregon. I'm willing to pay a reasonable premium to get the benefits of my top-tier elite status (or next-to-top tier) with each of these brands, plus earn more points, but these price premiums were completely unreasonable. We booked all 6 nights at lower-rung hotels. Are they as nice? Probably not. But they're also literally half the price of Hilton/Marriott/IHG.