Today's earworm and birthday all in one: Walk Hand In Hand

I grew up hearing the Gerry and the Pacemakers version of this song. It was pretty darned good, after all.

Now I discover what I've missed, all those years: Roy Hamilton.


Stylistic and general influence on Elvis Presley, as well as the man who inspired Sam Cooke to switch from gospel to  his famous secular sound, Hamilton combined elements of classical and gospel vocal training, to create his own unique handprint on American music.

Plus, he was one of the first to make a hit record of what has since become one of the most overdone tunes of the 1950s, "Unchained Melody".

He would have been celebrating his 92nd birthday, today.

Tourism, Day Thirteen: Lucky Me

Saturday, 6 June, 2014, I slept fitfully in my seatbelt, and woke up in a fog.

I kid you not. This was looking toward Cheyenne.

We were pretty much socked in until we neared the Nebraska state line,

 when the fog lifted and we rode forth in intermittent rain.

Somewhere just east of Lincoln, the clouds began to break up for us. We stopped for gas and whatever food was ready to go, and, while I was trying to unkink my legs by limping around the store, I found a display gondola filled with electronic accessories – including several different types and price ranges of adaptors. I pointed them out to my friend, who practically broke out in a dance of happiness. Not only was the one I pulled off the rack exactly the size and type she wanted, it was also only thirty dollars, including tax, which meant she could afford it, and she'd have a chance to plug in her laptop and do the paper which was due the next day at midnight (which, I might add, she had been given an extra time allowance beyond that Sunday for, because we had been out-of-country, but she's still a bit anxious about falling behind. Me, I'm a slacker. It's a wonder, opposite as we are, that we're still friends. I guess the universe really does enjoy mixed nuts).

She quit driving, climbed into the back seat next to her nephew, and the foster son drove the remainder of the way home, while she worked on her assignment.

Well, whoopee! Let's have a parade!

Her mood was improved, but that didn't mean we were going to stop for anything but fuel, still.




Naturally, I continued to stare out the window and take pictures of

 the Great American Midwest Landscape

Until we passed through Des Moines and came out the other side with a full tank, heading southeast on US-65. Then I got a bonus activity…

Des Moines, IA. Government is Golden.

shaking. The camera could handle it, but not I.

Seriously. If you have never driven the stretch of highway from Des Moines to Ottumwa, you do not know what shaking is. I don't care if you spent your career riding a jackhammer atop an out-of-balance washing machine anchored to an earthquake simulator, you have not been shaken the way US Highway 65 (and eventually US-63) will shake you. It is not safe to take babies on this road, for fear their little brains will rattle loose and Family Services will have you up on abuse charges.

If I could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate, I'd still be too stable for this road

Look at the above picture. Do you see the division of the wet patches, the little rectangles, with their demarcation lines crossing the road? This is not like the little separations on a sidewalk, or even little bumpy joints to the highway. These mark the waves in the pavement. One hour and thirty-five minutes of this rhythmic jarring of body and soul. And, lucky me! I still had a migraine. Plus, my legs and feet had swollen from their having been immobile so long, so they were tender as well…

Modern chemistry is my lifeline, but there were long moments when I seriously wondered if there were a lifeboat tethered at its other end, or just some a-hole shark yanking me around.

Agribusiness. It's a beautiful thing

 I distracted myself, as usual, trying to watch the scenery go by. That sort of worked. (Not really, but it was that, or whine. I hate whiners.)

I like people who have definite plans

It looked as though we were following on the heels of some pretty serious wetness.

In fact, we seemed to be gaining on the storm.

I was hoping it would be just fast enough ahead of us to be done raining when it came time to unload my crap (and my poor lumbering self) from the truck.

It was about an hour after sunset that we returned to Monmouth, and, indeed, the rains had almost ceased here. In just a few short minutes, I had all my gear unloaded from the truck and brought into the house.

On the down side, my feet had swollen so greatly that I couldn't wear my loosest slippers, my head was pounding, and everything in between was in some state of revolt.

On the up side, I was hailed as conquering hero by a doggyboy,

 a kittyboy,

 and a certain feline princess…

as well as cheerfully received home by a pair of parents:

Warmly ignored by the old M

and P. Such enthusiasm!

And then there was my own bed…but I don't need to draw you a picture, there.

I slept quite a bit, for the next week. I needed every last "Z" I got. It took longer than that, between resting and riding my bike again, to get my legs back to functional (still a bit of a twinge on a regular basis, and two hours on my feet are still my max before the completely quit).

The folks left on their two-week vacation and anniversary trip before the end of the week, packed with a few things I'd prepared for them to take to my seester (cookies for her & her hubby, and also a special batch for their dog).

I had the house to myself again, with the cats as my only company, and a chance to just appreciate the quiet solitude.

And then I got hit with that nasty cough…the one that's still tickling my throat fairly regularly, three and a half months later. 

The Fates obviously have a swell time twisting my thread.

Tourism, Day Twelve: The Agony of the Seat

Friday, 5 June, 2014.  We arrived in the waters just offshore of Seattle sometime around dawn, but didn't get completely docked until breakfast was nearly over. Once docked, though, we were given instructions to line up on deck five, and wait for our release.

Apparently, my friend (in her wheelchair) was given an easier out, and everybody else from her cabin went with her. They were away from the ship and comfortably waiting on a bench on the other side of Customs within a half hour. I was still standing and wincing and wishing I could trade in my knees for just about anything an hour after the line-up began. Go chasing a city bus just one time, and you pay forever after…

Finally, after working my way through the system, I joined the gang again, with minutes to spare before my friend's niece saw her friend drive up. That was not only her ride, but the chariot for my friend to get back to the truck, parked at the Motel 6 in Renton. I said my farewells to the niece, telling her that, as soon as it was possible for her to come back to town, she should be sure to look me up. I might not be a party girl, but I did enjoy her company during my less cranky times, and let her know so.

They loaded up her bags, and the three of them left.

A little less than two hours later, the big red pickup truck arrived. We loaded up our gear, strapped my friend's wheelchair onto its platform on the back, and made our way away from the Pacific Northwest.

It was here that she informed me that, not only were we not going to stop overnight near Wall, SD, but we were going to drive straight through the night and get home Saturday night.

Yeh.

Well, at least we'd looked at printed atlases and Google maps, and plotted the fastest route from Seattle, WA, to Monmouth, IL: drive straight across the mass of the nation on Interstate 90 to Sioux Falls, then cut south on I-29, to Sioux City, where we could pick up I-80 to Des Moines, then angle down on US-63 to Ottumwa and, finally, home on US-34.

Easy peasy.

Sure.

A minimum of 29 hours on the road, without rest, without stops for any reasonable amount of time to stretch and unkink my already problematic knees. 29 hours sitting in a mostly-closed cabin, with three people who, when tired or stressed out, could not stop lighting up cigarettes, and my antihistamines already maxed out.

I was going to have a swell time.

We weren't even going to stop for meals. We had, I was told, enough crap loaded up, if we wanted to pick up foods, we'd have to pick out whatever the truck stops had to offer.

But wait – it gets worse,

The power converter my friend had originally bought for this trip, so she could plug in her computer and do her work for her graduate studies had been swapped out by one of the men in her household, and she was left with an old, unreliable one which, during the drive out was iffy, but by fifteen minutes into the drive home, was proven to be completely worthless. She effing couldn't do her effing homework, and she was effing…well, you get the picture. I had quietly, meekly tried to suggest we check out a truck stop, because places like Pilot occasionally carried odd electronic stuff, and we might find a working replacement I'd be willing to spring for with my remaining funds, but I doubt she even heard what I was saying.

There was zero conversation.

She drove, burning through cigarette after cigarette.

The boys, having spent the previous week consuming all manner of fatty foods and great quantities of beer, had become greenhouse gas factories.

On the open highway, a window rolled down was too noisy, and bothered the driver.

I stared out my window and prayed to whatever god might hear me. Mostly, I prayed for unconsciousness to take me for the duration of the drive.

Meanwhile, I took pictures to distract myself. You can embiggen them to see better, by clicking on them.

Yay! Leaving Seattle! And traffic vanishes!

Peek at the peak of Mt Rainier

Somewhere around Snoqualmie Pass

Uh. Mah. Gahd. We're getting run over by a train. Please please please…

All the pretty horses

Not far from Spokane

Near Coeur d'Alene

Toward Montana

And here is where the whole country becomes
one great, beautiful, terrible nightmare, in my mind.

Or, put more succinctly, 

I have no idea which state I'm in, by now

but I'm pretty sure I'm in or approaching Montana

because we were halfway across it at sunset

when she decided there would be a change of course. The light went out in my soul.

Darkness was coming when she looked again at the route charted, and announced, "I'm not gonna [expletive deleted]ing drive all the way across South Dakota. [Bad word]ing South [naughty word]ing Dakota!"

I still have no idea what she has against South Dakota. It houses Mount Rushmore, Wall Drug Store, and the most awesome Badlands. And the weather forecast over most of it was clear and warm. But she was, as usual, adamant.

So she reprogrammed her satellite guidance system to take us due south, toward Laramie and Interstate 80, instead of the easy slope southward we had originally been given.

Sure. No big deal. Except for two things: (1) under optimal conditions, the abrupt drop south would add roughly two hours to our drive, and (2) we were not looking at optimal conditions, with fog, drizzle, and construction along the first half of the trip down Wyoming, which added a couple of hours to the drive. So, now, we were looking at the likelihood of missing supper, and, unless conditions were to improve, not getting home until well after dark.

I had been in the car for ten hours, and would not have been looking forward to another twenty-four straight hours in that truck, even if I had been in a jolly humor. And I was far from that.

Aside from the knee and back pain, my restless leg had finally started to act up, my feet and legs were beginning to swell from lack of motion, and I was getting a migraine.

I suppose it could have been worse. I could have had the backhouse trots.

Tourism Days Nine and Ten: A Great Honkin' Slab of Ice (and Some Rocks and Floaty Bits), then Ocean Again

I was up with the sun on Tuesday, 3 June 2014. In fact, I rose in time to turn off the alarm on my phone.

You'd never guess I was still excited about seeing a great honkin' slab of ice.

It's just that, well, we haven't had a glacier in my neighborhood since, literally, the last ice age. Tornadoes we get. Floods we get. Apparently solid blocks of ice which creep along and carry great honkin' rocks with them…not so much.

As always, click on any picture to embiggen…

As we approached our goal, the view from my cabin was impressive enough that I decided haste was in order.

Objects in lens are larger than they appear

I dressed for cool weather (sweatshirt and leggings – and, for a change, socks!) and hurried up topside, to deck ten, the upper observation deck, at the bow of the ship. My cane, my camera, and I took in the vista,

Dang, are we going to get rain all the time?
Must not be summer yet…

such as it was, initially.  But, as it had been yesterday, in Skagway, after only a short while, the rains ceased, the clouds lifted and began to break apart enough to see more clearly

what was around us.

 

Peering at the crowd peering at the glacier

Dawes Glacier is feeling well-protected from sunburn

Dawes Glacier, with the sun trying very hard to shine upon it

Turning counter-clockwise from Dawes Glacier, to our entry/exit passage

Fresh, intense glacial waters

I listened to a few of the other passengers discussing what it was we were looking at (I'd overheard at least four being introduced by their companions as geologists or geology professors at small colleges. Useful to have around, when looking at rocks). Plus, the public address system carried the ship's captain's voice to us, explaining things like the vivid blueness of the ice, the bright color of the water (both having to do with the ice being purified and condensed under great pressure for millennia). The striations on the mountainsides, I heard, were from glacial movement dragging great stones across, to scrape and scour).

Sure, it looks like just a chunk of ice, but (a) it's bigger than two double semi trailers, and
(b) it's a very pretty blue

We stayed to observe the great honkin' slab of ice for the better part of two hours, I think, with the ship doing a complete 360º turn so everybody got a great shot or two.

After the full doughnut, the ship pointed away from the glacier, tracking back out as slowly as we had entered, so as to keep the wake to a minimum. And, when you get right down to it, for a floating city, the wake we left was very small.

For more than an hour, the waters were glacial-water vivid

and laden with icebergs, all sizes

But eventually we got to a point where regular waters
overran the pretty aqua of the glacial supply

Still moving at just about 15-20 knots on our way out from the narrow channels of Tracy Arm Fjord,
the clouds came back over us for most of the day

Waters were still almost like glass
as the waterway widened toward the ocean

Out on the open seas by sunset, with clearing skies

Wednesday morning: somebody else's cruise ship is heading north, while we're heading back south.
This is what the weather looked like pretty much all day. 

Wednesday, after I returned from my breakfast, I found a note on my bed, along with the usual stack of papers – schedules, announcements, and coupons – a notice that, due to a lack of sufficient interest from the passengers on this cruise, my prepackaged excursion to the Empress Hotel for formal tea had been cancelled (I guess they couldn't muster a dozen people who were willing to spend $120 on a bus tour, a visit to Butchardt Gardens at peak springtime, plus a lovely cuppa, served in style, with a variety of tasty desserts).  I would be free to book a different excursion through the hospitality desk, if I wished, or I was also free to be fully reimbursed for that package, either in cash or ship's credit. I arranged for a simple all-you-want-to-ride bus pass, and took the difference in cash. I would, I told myself, go for a ride, and then spend my Thursday shopping in Victoria, by jingo!

Since there were no land excursions to be had on Wednesday while we were on the open ocean, the crew had arranged all manner of entertainment. I took advantage of very little of it. There were some sales on items from the ship's duty-free shops, and I did consider buying some snooty liquor to bring home, but, well, there was nobody at home I thought would appreciate what they had in stock. (I was also disappointed that they didn't have any ship postcards. Those would have been, for me, the coolest of the cool.)

Wednesday was also the Big Day for Making Memories…that is, for everybody who wanted pseudo-studio pictures of themselves to dress in their Sunday Best and head to deck five, where, all around the central atrium, crew members had set up photo "booths", with scrims, and drop scenes, witty banter to keep the smiles on film from looking too forced. I put on my One Dress (I had bought it for my class reunion last summer, and then hadn't worn it, so it was fresh and pretty and felt completely strange), and joined the gang for our photo opp. My friend had prepaid for a full package, and who was I to begrudge her this record?

After our photo session, we had reservations for dinner not at the usual place –
all other evenings, we'd supped at the main "restaurant", but tonight, we dined in style, and on the ship's tab, due to the tangle over our rooms and room cards, back on that first day. We had a table at the ship's steak house.

For those who are unfamiliar with cruise practices, there are several tiers of services available on board. Your generic ticket, while it isn't exactly steerage, does not get you into the health club, spa, or upscale dining establishments. You have to pay extra for those. In fact, other than your bed, head, and baseline meals (which are quite luxurious in their own right), almost everything else you might want to do on the ship will cost you extra on your account. For example, to drink anything other than that doubtable tap water – e.g., bottled water, sody pop, or juices – I paid about $20 per day for the prepackaged privilege of carrying around an insulated adult version of a sippy cup, into which the bartenders would pour ice and my beverage. If I wanted alcohol added to it, I could have paid double for the package, or bought single drinks – on my shipboard account – for about $8 per drink, on average.

So, when I say we dined at the steak house, I'm saying we got a bonus service, and we didn't pay for it, because there had been a spot of trouble my friend had raised a stink about, on day one. All five of us were offered a meal that evening at the premium dining room of our choice. My personal preference would have been the Chinese "restaurant", and I know my friend's niece was very interested in testing their sushi bar (she is a chef at a raw bar in New Orleans), and the boys…well, the boys would be happy to just have plates shoved in front of them, and there was an unlimited pasta Italian place. But my friend was not going to eat all those vegetables that they put in Chinese food, and no way would she even approach the door of a place serving raw fish, and she wasn't in the mood for Italian… so steak it was. I wasn't going to complain. I kind of like steak. I kind of liked it in the regular dining room. But what makes my friend happy….

The crew of our Carnival Cruise ship Rhapsody of the Seas was very interested in making sure everybody was as happy as they could make them, within reason.

And, when I say "within reason", I mean it. We all five got free meal upgrades, but the beverages served (no, we didn't drink Diet Coke™ with our T-bones) were not gratis. My friend's niece discovered that specialty waters were available, so, feeling a need to share, she ordered several bottles for the table. At an extra $8 per liter. Which, she declared, was a fair price. Call me a philistine, but, much as I appreciated that it had a lovely flavor (or lack thereof, as compared to many bottles and cups of aqueous solution), I'd have been fine with a Dasani™. Or maybe even tap water. Well, not really plain tap water. But a good glass of filtered tap, maybe. With a twist. As long as they're not drawing from my hometown well.

But we drank a liter apiece. That was an extra $40 for water.

The steak was worth it, though. And my chocolate-laden dessert…sublime. On the other hand, my friend's niece ordered a crème brûlée, but ended up with something more closely resembling a crème caramel…she was more impressed with the work of the dessert chefs at the regular dining room than in the premium space.

Still, it was a satisfying "freebie".

After dinner, a live show. Followed by the rest of the gang playing, drinking, and smoking in the casino, and my thinking about going to bed early, but actually slipping away to soak in the hot tub, because my knees still felt like they'd been stumbling down mile after mile of slopes. And, then, to sit and watch the waves go by.

With one companion.

Found loitering in my cabin, Wednesday after breakfast.
I let him hang around for the rest of the trip.