Bitchy McBitcherson's Blog

Tag: travel

  • Desert Mirage

    I am currently in Las Vegas, because I am an idiot, or a masochist, or both.  There is just no good reason for a person with Summer SAD to “vacation” in Las Vegas in June, but that’s what I did.

    My husband had to come here for business, and because he is always extremely busy with his start-up, I decided to come on out with him. He’d be too busy working to spend time with me, but the drive to Vegas and back would give me more time to hang out and talk to him than I get in the average week, so it seemed well worth it.

    Until it was 106 fucking degrees in the fucking shade and the fucking hotel room won’t cool the fuck off.

    I used to spend parts of my summers in Vegas. My grandparents lived here when I was a child. Mornings would start early to get some good play time in before it got too hot.  My grandfather would walk me to the local playground so I could play for a little while before the metal slide got literally too hot to use safely. Then we might walk over to 7 Eleven for a Slurpee. If I didn’t get a Slurpee, there would probably be coins left on the ledge outside the house for me to get something from an ice cream truck later in the day. They sold the house when I was 8 years old and left Vegas for a cheaper town in the middle of nowhere Nevada to retire. I drove by the house yesterday. My grandmother would be horrified to see the condition that the current owners have it in. The huge sagebrush field that I explored is now completely littered with 2 story suburban cookie cutter tract homes. Overall, it felt surreal to be there. I had planned to call my father while parked out front, but decided I didn’t really like it there, so I meandered on my way.

    I stopped at a store to look for a new purse (my current one is falling apart) but had no luck with that either. Upon exit of the store into the overbearing heat, I headed back to the car when I sign across the parking lot caught my eye.

    Rita’s Ice Custard Happiness

    Ooh, ice custard. Do I want that?
    Of course you want that. It’s happiness.
    Well, yeah, but should I have it?
    What “should”? It’s happiness. Go get some happiness.
    It probably isn’t any good. It’s probably too expensive.
    It’s Happiness, it says so right in the name, plus The Beatles say Rita is lovely.
    I don’t think it is the same Rita.
    Whatever, come on, people are always accusing you of being too negative. Go get some happiness. Be a person that deserves happiness.
    Fuck you.
    HAPPINESS
    Serious, fuck you. Alright, fine, I’ll go get some fucking happiness.

    So I drag my heat exhausted ass across the hot black top toward Rita’s Ice Custard Happiness. So. Hot. I have to walk around the building when I get there, the sign was on the back of this little section of strip mall that is floating out on the street side of the parking lot. I pass the Subway that is next door, and get to the front of Rita’s Ice Custard Happiness and am greeted by a “Coming Soon” sign.

  • Fresh Air

    When I wrote about being in Vegas, I forgot to mention something that was really interesting to me about The Cosmopolitan.

    I hate smoking. It drives me totally crazy. Well, I don’t mind the idea of smoking. Go do whatever the fuck you want. I just hate the smell of it. I hate the smell of stale smoke leftover on smokers, or on myself if I’ve been in a smoky place, and I really am made utterly miserable when I am where I can smell somebody actively smoking.

    There was a time when it didn’t bother me. I became sensitive while I was pregnant. I became sensitive to damn near everything while I was pregnant, and I vomited for 8.5 months. It was gross and miserable. Smoke was one of the major triggers (as was the smell of mint). More than 16 years later, the reaction has eased, but it never went away.

    So, I hate being near smoking, and find it very difficult to be actively social with smokers, because even if they are very courteous about not ever smoking near me, they always stink to me.

    I am not actually in favor of laws banning smoking in establishments, as I believe that should be up to the business owner, but I do enjoy the benefit of those laws, and have lived for a very long time now in places where I am not asked whether I want to sit in the smoking or non-smoking section when I enter a restaurant. The culture shock of being back in Nevada always catches me a little off guard. I drive into Vegas and think, and often say, “Why don’t we come here more often?” but 10 minutes in a casino and I remember exactly why I don’t go there more often.

    Which brings me to the point of the post (thought I’d never get there, right?).

    Something about the air system at The Cosmopolitan was amazing. The smokers there didn’t bother me at all. Yes, I could smell smoke if I stood immediately next to a person with a lit cigarette, but at a few feet away, the smoke was not reaching me. I don’t know how they do it, but I wish every place was doing it.

  • Playing Catch Up – Part I

    So, a lot has been happening, and none of that has been blogging.

    I moved. I don’t live in Minnesota any longer. We moved back to Los Angeles.

    It has been pure hell, but all in all, it is a very good thing. I am glad we made the decision that we did. I’m glad we moved. It’s just that moving sucks.

    We knew for a while. My husband gave a month’s notice at work, but they didn’t want him to share the news right away, and while they can’t enforce that, we decided to give them some breathing room, and we kept it quiet for a reasonable amount of time. By the time it became more public, I was simply too busy to blog about it.

    Leaving Minnesota was difficult. It was emotionally difficult and physically difficult. I wanted to move back to California, but in the two and a half years we spent in Minnesota, we’d made some good friends. I’d also put a lot of time and heart into working with ACT V. Friends that I made, I can keep. That is what the internet is for. It’s very difficult to continue fostering for an organization I was very happy to be volunteering for, from 2000 miles away.

    Speaking of 2000 miles…

    ROAD TRIP.

    Ugh.

    Big. FAT. UGH!

    2 cars + 4 humans + 2 cats + 2 dogs + 2000 miles = STRESS

    To start things off, when we took the cars in for an oil change and a quick checkup, the mechanic discovered stuff wrong with one of them. Stuff that should be fixed before the road trip, and stuff that cost a bunch of dollars, because it always costs a bunch of dollars when the mechanic says “Well, we found…”

    This got us on our road trip later than originally planned.

    That, and our own insanity, but that’s another issue.

    Seriously, we left our rental house at 11:30 PM. I know, I know, logically it seems like it would make more sense to just sleep there one more night, but it we just needed to go, or we’d find more reasons to linger the next morning.

    So, we left our former home a total mess (because we knew that a wonderful friend had our back on dealing with the MN end), and we drove by the house of one of the ACT V people to deposit a final donation of blankets and detergent on their doorstep (much to the suspicion of some neighbors that saw us).

    Then we headed out of town…

    In a snow storm.

    I’m not kidding. It snowed on us on the way out of Minnesota. We pushed ourselves to the point of exhaustion and got our butts to Iowa, so that we had left the state. There we stayed at Microtel Inn in Clear Lake that didn’t charge us any extra fees for the pets, and had a very nice and accommodating staff. Unfortunately it was also snowing and hailing on us in Clear Lake as we tried to unload the cars and get our butts into the room. In order to have enough space in the cars (because we needed room for 4 people, 2 traumatized cats, 1 large kitty litter, 1 cranky old dog, 1 puppy, food for all the critters, and a disturbing amount of wine, not for road trip consumption), we’d purchased a giant duffel bag to keep luggage in.

    It turns out it takes about an hour to get 4 people, 2 dogs, 2 cats, and all the stuff the 8 of them need for one stupid night, settled into a motel room.

    Did I mention the snowing and hailing? Oh, well also there was horrible biting, bitter, nasty, COLD wind. It was late April. We were dressed (and packed) for early spring. My husband got himself a minor case of frost bite on his fingers unloading the car that first night. Good times.

    The next morning I set out our plan for the day by finding a motel that would take the pets and plotting our route. I’d been planning originally on aiming for 500 miles a day, but decided that day to stretch and reserve us a room just over 600 miles away, because of our late start and our race to get to California before we got charged extra by the movers for not being able to meet them on time to get our ginormous amount of stuff back.

    So, we were aiming for Sterling, CO and Best Western Sundowner, which charged us an extra $20 to let our pets stay there ($12 for one animal, $20 for two or more), but had a larger room for the price than our other options, and after the first night, I knew we’d do better with a little extra space.

    We got on the road planning to be in our room by about 10:30 PM. Unfortunately, it was an extremely windy day, and we hadn’t really perfected our strapping the giant duffel bag to the top of the car technique yet. It took all day to get that technique down. In total, about 3 hours was spent in various parking lots, rest areas (BTW, Iowa has the nicest rest areas I have ever seen.), and wide shoulders, working on that technique. This meant we got to the motel about 1:30 AM.

    Watson at one of the rest area stops in Iowa.

    Remember the one hour to get everybody settled in the room thing? It takes even longer when you are on the second floor of a Best Western that doesn’t have an elevator. WTF? Also, their free wireless internet sucked frozen possum testicles, or as I like to call them, possnutsicles. I needed internet in order to send a very detailed email to a friend, including floorplans of our house that I’d edited to map out the placement of all of our furniture. The movers had made amazingly good (not good for us) time getting the load to CA, and the path of least resistance for dealing with that, was to have a friend manage the unloading of the stuff. Between the battling with the internet, the super slow connection, and the occasionally drifting off between keystrokes, I finally hit send and got to sleep at 5:30 AM. Then up early to battle the internet again in order to find the right stopping place for the night. By the time we were ready to head out, I was 31 flavors of cranky.

    Now we’ll pause for a message from our sponsors. Actually, we’ll pause so I can sleep. You’ll have to wait for another day to find out more about our road trip.

  • The Mark of Stress

    There is a cold sore blister on my face. It is ugly. It hurts.

    There is a big knot in the back of my neck and my right shoulder.

    My lower back is so cranky, it is making crunchy noises.

    Stress- it doesn’t just fuck with my mind.

    Today was overall a decent day. The thing about being dragged kicking and screaming away from home by the bitch I call life, is that I have a lot less work to do here. As long as I don’t think about it waiting for me back there, I can just sort of chill. Sort of.

    Except that people in New Mexico are so relaxed that they actually stress me out. “Laid back” looks a lot like spaced out and lazy to me.

    I have seen some art that I liked. That is a plus.

  • Not Reassured

    Things I DO NOT want my pilot to say over the intercom when giving updates as we sit endlessly on the tarmac in a snow storm.

    “I’ve been doing this a lot of years, and I’ve never had this happen before.”

    “catastrophic consequences”

    Dude. Word things differently.

    I’m just saying.