My, it's been a while since blogging, partly due to vacation which occurred last week. There's plenty of stories to tell, so I will do this as a recap-by-day blog. For example, I will blog our first day today, our second day tomorrow, and so on. Here goes. Enjoy...

07.20.2003 Sunday

Wake up at 5:30 am. Our flight departs at 9:30 for Myrtle Beach, and I'm told to get to the airport at least 2 hours before departure. I get ready, finish packing, and my ride gets here at 6:45 am. We get to Newark Liberty International Airport at approximately 7:05 am, after passing briefly through the lovely town of Irvington. For those of you unfamiliar with the area, Irvington is like New Jersey's Compton. We jump in line outside by the skycaps forContinental Airlines. The line moved rather quickly actually. The dude checked our bag and gave us our boarding passes and inside we went.

There's a side note to this story. I had made our flight reservation in February. Since that time, I had received 3 different notices in the mail stating that our flight time had changed, with the latest notice changing my seats as well. I called their "customer care" number and they said I would have to tell them at the ticket counter inside the airport.

So we make our way to our terminal and make it through security. I had to take my shoes off, but no big deal otherwise. We get through and make it to our gate rather early, and notice our flight is not on the computer screen yet. We head over to the book shop to peruse their selection of reading and get back to find a place to sit for a few hours. When we came back, I was able to change our seats so we were together. Well, the flight finally shows up and we board pretty much on time. We find our seats and the plane begins moving towards the runway, and suddenly the lights and engines stop. Hmm. "This is your captain. We are having some problems with our generator. Sit tight briefly while maintenance takes a look at it. Meanwhile, the air is not working, and we are sitting in the plane oh, for about 2 hours before we find out that we have to switch flights.

The flight we are switching to is across the airport, at gate 124 or something. So we rush across, and have no idea when the flight is leaving, so we eat some Teriyaki chicken at the food court, which was excellent. The flight begins boarding around 12, and we finally take off soon after. The flight was pretty smooth, and we landed after 2 sometime.

Now it's time to get the luggage and get my rental car. I head over to the Enterprise kiosk, and they tell me they don't have any cars left for my reservation, so the guy at least hooks me up with Thrifty for the same price, and probably a better car.

We get to our hotel, the lovely Patricia Grand. We check in at 3, and find our room. We go in the room. We realize this vacation is going to suck-diddly-uck. There's a huge puddle on the rug by the ac and balcony, probably from the ac leaking. It's not just a little damp, but it's like when it downpours and you go play mini-golf afterwards. It sloshes like that. I call the desk and they say they'll send a guy up. Meanwhile, we examine the room to find mold on the walls, probably from the lake in our room, a smaller room than advertised, and an ash tray, even though I reserved a non-smoking room.

Knock. Hey guy, come look at this oasis in our room. Dag, yall, that's about 5 gallons of water, probably cuz the ac froze up. I'll be back with a vac. This is all said in the South Carolina accent. He comes back up very quickly and sucks up the water with a monster shop vac. He was a real nice guy at least, and quick.

We decide to go out because we're getting hungry and don't want to stay in a moldy room. We head for Broadway at the Beach, which is a big cluster of restaurants, shops, bars, etc., all around this lake thing. We stroll around to see a long line at the Hard Rock Cafe, which is fine with me, because I didn't want to spend $10 for a burger anyway. We find a keen place called the Key West Grill. There's a line, but we decide to see what the wait will be. The dude says, well there's no wait if you want to eat outside. Of course! We're hungry. We sit right on the dock of this lake, eat some dirty salmon and potato skins, and enjoy a nice breeze. All right, maybe things won't be so bad after all. We walk around a bit and decided to hit the Imax theater. We saw some adrenaline video with dudes who jump off planes and fly.

We head back to the hotel and decide to take a night swim in the pool, which was freezing it seemed, but there was no way I was going in the heated indoor pool. That's where pee lives.

An interesting day one with a not-bad ending after a rather horrible beginning. We'll see what Monday brings.