Coronado!

The Gaslamp Quarter!

Chinese Lunar New Year Celebration!

It was all happening in San Diego today...

The Zoo!

A Russian Restaurant!

The Rocky Horror Picture Show at Midnite!

It was all happening in San Diego today...

Welcome

Welcome to San Diego.

Tomorrow I fly to San Diego for Jester's 40th birthday party.

The odd thing is that the weather in Southern California is going to be overcast, cool, and rainy... whereas here in Central Washington it's clear, warm, and sunny skies.

I am having to dig out my coat, which is something I haven't had to wear here for weeks.

I am also updating my 11-inch MacBook Air, which is the best travel companion ever. Small, fast, light... if only my electric mixer was this easy to travel with.

Boy do I miss blogs.

I have an ongoing promise to myself that I won't go into work on the weekends until noon. Rarely do I keep that promise, because I'd rather intrude on my precious personal time than have to work until midnight on a a weekend.

This morning I actually managed to keep my promise to myself. And it's all Jack Fischl's fault. JACK is the reason that I didn't drag my sorry ass to work until 1:30...

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Back when blogging was a thing, I read a lot of blogs. Like seriously many. As in hundreds. At one point I was reading 362 blogs, 256 of which were personal blogs of interesting people with interesting things to say. I know this because I once mentioned it in a video...

A surprising number of these bloggers became friends that I still keep in contact with today... even though they have long-since given up on blogging. A few of them I manage to visit in person as I travel the earth. Most of them, however, I only manage to keep up with because of Twitter or Facebook or whatever.

It's not the same.

Twitter gives you 140 characters in which to express yourself. That's great for simple thoughts ("I went to the grocery store today"), but total shit for actual communication ("I went to the grocery store today and was attacked by a grizzly bear"). Wait, what? With blogging you'd probably get the whole grizzly bear story right down to the last detail. Now you get the bare minimum of details that always leave you hanging. If you're lucky, there might be a photo attached, but that's about it.

Facebook isn't much better. Sure you have more space to write, but most people don't use it. Twitter and text messaging has destroyed real personal storytelling forever. Instead you get meaningless updates about winning a trivia game or automated data dumps of how far somebody ran today or random links to random stuff... anything but the story of somebody's life.

Am I the only one who misses that?

Anyway...

This morning I was trying to come up with travel ideas that were off the beaten path yet affordable. Looking at my travel map, I noticed once again how Central and South America have barely been touched. This annoys me greatly, so I started poking around the internet for unique travel experiences in those regions. Eventually I landed on a site called Keteka, "Your gateway to authentic tours and activities in Latin America." And indeed they do have a variety of interesting "off the beaten path" tours that are reasonably priced.

After exploring the site for a bit, I happened to notice a section called "Stories from the Road" at the bottom of the page. The first link was "Jack's Blog."

And there went three hours of my life.

What a fascinating guy. He started a blog as a way to document his adventures in Panama with the Peace Corps, and his every entry is fantastic stuff. Entertaining stories about everything from daily life in the rainforest to battling bat poop. Suddenly I was sucked back into the world of blogs again, remembering how great it was to be an observer into somebody's life that's different from my own.

And that's the thing that makes blogging so wonderful... everybody has a life that's different from mine. Which means everybody's life is interesting to me, even though they may find it mundane.

Boy do I miss blogs.

Such a pity that telling your story and inviting people into your life is an artform that's dying out in favor of snippets of 140 characters or less.

Such is progress.

I guess.

So, if you want an awesome read from the glory days of blogging, Jack Fischl is your guy.

I recommend starting at the last page, which is the first page chronologically. Then on each subsequent page, you have to scroll to the bottom and read entries in reverse in order to keep moving forward. Confusing, I know, but it's worth the effort.

Here's the last (first) page of Jack's Blog.

And don't hate me for making you miss blogging. I still do this crap every day.

It suddenly occurs to me...

...every day is hump day at the Giza Plateau!

Happy Wednesday.

Home for a month.

Hopefully two.

I've started taking a couple months off during the winter because I really hate travel this time of year. I've spent the past two decades being trapped in airports because of snow and ice, and I'm just done with it. At least that's the plan.

Which is subject to change at any moment.

Unfortunately.

An early morning flight from Minneapolis back to Seattle.

Where Delta was kind enough to upgrade me to first class... so I guess today is the day the perks die, not last Wednesday after all. Still... again... it was good while it lasted.

After several delays out of Seattle, my flight finally boarded... but on a Weather Advisory... which means there's a chance we won't get to land, but will instead have to turn around and head back to Seattle if the weather is too bad.

Fortunately that never happened and I made it home just fine.

I guess that means the last trip of 2014 was a success. Plus I get to update my "States Visited Map"...

South Dakota and Nebraska make 49.

North Dakota is the only state I haven't visited yet.

I'll try to get that taken care of next year.

This morning I woke up early because I had stuff to accomplish.

I wasn't going to visit Eastern South Dakota without seeing The Corn Palace... and I wasn't going to visit Sioux Falls without seeing the replica of Michelangelo's David.

But first? Breakfast. Which was going to be the TWIN BING candy bar that I bought at the Sioux City Museum yesterday!

I say "was" because it turns out the "BING" in a TWIN BING bar is for BING CHERRY! Cherry being a flavor that I loathe. So... no breakfast for me!

The hour drive back to Sioux Falls was uneventful... except for the roadside billboards that keep popping up. Unlike Washington State which has banned billboards, in South Dakota they are very much alive. Half of them are telling people to visit the famous Wall Drug Store, which is odd because it's located five hours away. The other half? Well... anything you can think of, really.

One of the best billboards I saw was the one that said "EAT BEEF!" and had a photo of a steak on it with nothing more. Direct and to the point.

But my favorite billboard? The one that said "Eat Steak. Wear Furs. Keep Your Guns. The American Way." My biggest regret this trip is that I didn't pull over and take a photo of it. Lucky for me, a YouTuber caught it...

Still from a video by Dumbface Tour... you can watch their video here.

Stuff like this is hysterical in its idiocy. For me, the "American Way" is having the freedom to NOT eat steak... to NOT wear furs... to NOT have a gun. The American Way is not having to conform to some redneck's moronic ideal of what it means to be an "American." But whatever. Expression of stupid shit is also The American Way.

After blowing past Sioux Falls, I headed west on I-90 towards Mitchell, South Dakota... home of THE CORN PALACE!! I've wanted to visit this place after I first learned about it years ago. I mean, come on, it's a sports venue COVERED IN CORN! Every year the corn murals are different, but they all kind of look like this...

Photo from WikiMedia Commons by User Parkerdr

Unfortunately...

The Corn Palace is undergoing rennovations just now, so what I saw was this...

The building may be a mess, but the murals are still intact...

The inside is just as good...

And of course I crossed the street to visit the gift shop and meet Cornelius, the Corn Palace mascot...

Hopefully I'll get back one day when everything is put back together.

There was just enough time to head back to Sioux Falls and hunt down David before I had to be to the airport, so off I went.

Fortunately, he was pretty easy to find...

And off I go...

And so today I flew into Sioux Falls so I could rent a car and drive down to Sioux City... home to the latest US Hard Rock Hotel and Casino. It's nothing overly-fancy, but it does have some nice pieces of memorabilia and pretty good theming throughout.

But I'm getting ahead of myself...

As you can tell in that last photo, the hotel part and the casino part are two separate buildings. The hotel was the former Simmons Hardware Company Warehouse (which you can read about here)... then they plastered the casino building right up next to it. You can see that they used the original exterior wall as the new interior dividing wall when you use the rear entrance...

The lobby is beautiful and decorated nicely for the holidays...

Interestingly enough, the reception desk has a full bar behind it. I don't know that I've ever seen that before!

The rooms are great, but not terribly "Hard Rock." With the exception of a guitar painting and a strip of photos next to the toilet, there's just not much to distinguish this from a "regular" hotel room... albeit a very nice one...

Hallways are pretty mundane and memorabilia-free, except for the carpet and door art...

Memorabilia is fairly good once you get to the casino portion. Not so much on the casino floor, but all the way around it...

A shirt worn by Elvis Presley!

Not wanting to spend all my time in a casino (I'm not much of a gambler), I decided to head out into the city and see what museums could be found in walking distance from the Hard Rock. The first I ran across was the Sioux City Art Center... which is not an actual museum, but they do have a small collection. The building itself is one of their best works of art, however...

Much to their credit, they had a beautiful Dale Chihuly seaform vase in their collection...

And a series of paintings focusing on cornfields. I couldn't really tell if they were painted to be faded and tough to make out... or if they were badly faded from sun damage or something. Still interesting. Though I found it impossible to photograph them well...

Much to my surprise, they also have a Jackson Pollock on loan...

Not one of my favorites by him, but Polock's works are alway great to see in person... the way the paint layers up is an interesting effect that gets lost in photos.

From there I walked to the Sioux City Museum, which focuses on the history of (you guessed it) Sioux City...

There's a lot of history in a relatively small space... almost too much at times, because it gets so cluttered you don't know where to look...

A nice museum, really... and totally free (though you can make a donation).

After a while I decided to head back to the hotel... disappointed that both cities I visited bearing the name of the Great Sioux Nation didn't actually have a museum dedicated to the Native Americans which inhabited (and continue to inhabit) the region. A teepee and a few crafts in the City Museum were about it. Perhaps one of the Indian reservations would have a museum, but they're so scattered I wouldn't know where to begin looking. I've done some cursory Google searches and came up empty. Guess I need to find a book.

Oh... and I found this cool shot along the way...

Dinner was an interesting side journey.

Three days ago, Blogography reader "Omaha Carl" left this comment...

As always, just LOVE it when you share your travels.
If you ever get to fly-over country. i.e. the Omaha region, consider me for a guide, or at least for suggestions.
Carl Mann
(NOT the country singer from the 50s and 60s)

Smartass that I am, I replied with this...

I’ll be in flyover country day after tomorrow… see you then! :-)

It was a joke... but then I got to thinking about how Omaha couldn't be more than an hour-and-a-half south of Sioux City. So I Googled it and, sure enough, an hour and thirty-four minutes...

So... a couple emails later and I was off to Omaha for a terrific dinner with Carl...

If you're ever in Omaha, Anthony's makes a mean bowl of pasta (and it's way more than I could eat!). I'm just sad that I didn't have room to eat a salad with some Dorothy Lynch dressing (which is apparently a very Omaha thing to do given that it was invented in the city of St. Paul, due East of the city).

Thanks so much to Omaha Carl for the great evening!