I usually try to go down and visit my dad and brother a couple of times a year, and often that’s what I do with the November Veteran’s Day holiday (since C passed and I no longer go down for Thanksgiving). But this year, that holiday is smack in the middle of the week and we’ll be in the final prep weeks for 1776, so I grabbed this Monday holiday instead. (*sigh* No one wants Columbus Day any more and Indigenous People’s Day just seems artificial to me, although I’m happy to have the day off.)
I took Friday off, spent a leisurely morning doing office tasks and closing up the apartment, then off to the airport. Travel to Raleigh/Durham was completely unremarkable as it should be. Arrived mid-afternoon, picked up rental car. As always Avis gave me a bigger car than I asked for. This was a Chevy Equinox. Not quite the tank I ended up with when I went to New Hope over the summer, but big enough. It drove nicely, I must say, although I found the steering column controls (for shifting, for wipers etc) to be really bizarre. I got used to them. Off to the hotel, this time a Courtyard by Marriot. Staff was super-nice, room was nice and big.
Off to Dad’s assisted living place. We sat around and chatted, then went out for dinner. Targeted an Irish Pub called the “Hibernian”, but the parking lot was jam-packed, so we went down the road to a different pub called The Piper’s Tavern. Dad had a reuben or such, I had a crabcake sandwich with coleslaw – and a Blue Moon (they didn’t have cider, oddly enough). We both got big-ass desserts to help us with our big asses (well, mine at least) – Dad got a chocolate peanut butter pie and I got cheesecake with chocolate sauce, which I ended up having them box half of up. Back to his place for a bit, then I left.
Stopped at the Walgreens for room supplies (diet coke, bottled watter, milk for the coffee). Oddly enough, they didn’t have any little bottles of milk or half and half or creamer. I could have bought a big ol’ carton of milk and used up like an 8th of it, but it was cheaper and more whimsical to buy a can of Reddi Whip, which I did.
Then back to the hotel, where I almost immediately ate the other half of the cheesecake. Whee, such a party boy.
Saturday, woke up leisurely and decided to skip breakfast as was still full from night before (thank you, Zepbound). Noted that as often happens in hotels, there were four packets of coffee, but three of them were decaf. Used the regular, and hid one of the decafs so maybe the maid would give me two regulars to replace them. (nice thought… didn’t work out that way…)
Got to Dad’s around ten, hung out. We went for a walk around the corridors (it was rainy outside). Not all that long ago, Dad was doing three-mile walks regularly with my brother, but that’s not happening any more. Dad is now using a rolling thing for stability, and the walk around the building was enough for him. (one plus about the facility is Dad is getting regular physical and occupational therapy, so they are on him about what exercise he should be doing, and he’s doing it)
Sam showed up to go out to lunch with us. We tried the Hibernian again, plenty of room this time. Dad got a ‘Rachel’ (turkey Reuben), Sam got a salad with shrimp and I got a buffalo chicken sandwich. (they had cider, although the waitress didn’t seem to know what ‘draft’ meant. “yes, we have draft cider. It’s in a can.”) Unfortunately, Sam right now has a lot of dietary restrictions and couldn’t eat the salad as presented, so we ordered something else for him and boxed that up. But we had a nice time as a trio.
Sam took off and Dad and I decided to watch a movie. I have a whole list in Google Sheets of movies I want to watch at some point, and my buddy Josh had said one of his favorites was “The Guns of Navarone” and I’d never seen it. So we watched that.
It was really good! Amused that there’s a movie with both Anthony Quinn and Anthony Quayle in it. Everyone’s good, but good lord, Anthony Quinn just looks like he’s made for one’s sexual pleasure. Like, that’s his purpose in life. *fans self*
Neither of us were hungry enough for dinner at that point, so Dad had some snackies while we watched the news, then I took off.
The Marriot was, oddly enough, in a shopping mall complex (the Triangle Town Center, if anyone cares) and was right next to a Chili’s. I decided to go have a drink and get an appetizer. They had all sorts of silly drinks on the menu, and apparently they were all tequila-based. I asked the waitress if they could do a cosmo, but gave her a backup of a “Witches Brew” margarita, which was similar to the curacao-flavored blue margaritas we’d made for the Jaws viewing party – and that’s what I ended up with. Also got the ‘southwestern egg rolls’, one of those bar snack foods made in a lab. I had a good time, but Charles trained me too well and I find restaurants where clearly there’s no actual cooking happening in the kitchen to be creepy now.
It did occur to me that I was a single man with a car in a strange town and I could have gone out and cavorted with the local gaiety, but I was not up for it.
Oh, yes, I’d forgotten that the Marriot was one of those places that doesn’t turn the room over every day, which meant all I had left for in-room coffee was decaf, sigh. I could have thrown on clothes and gone downstairs and gotten a real coffee, but I just sucked it up and had a decaf. (with Reddi Whip! fun!)
I’d felt vaguely mopey all day Saturday and suspected it was because I’d spent two days basically sitting around not moving, so started Sunday morning with a walk around (like literally around, not inside) the shopping mall. It was dark and drizzly, kind of spooky. Saw almost no one, but it was a hefty walk and I’m glad I did it, and I didn’t need the umbrella (side effects of the hurricane/tropical storm hitting the coast) until the last five minutes. Got a bagel and a cappucino, yay caffeine.
Back to Dad’s. He had a roster of football games to watch, and was on the first one. We had vague plans of going out for lunch, then to a museum or something, but then the tornado warnings started (and in Raleigh, these interrupt the TV broadcasts. Maybe they do at home too, I watch very little live TV). Both our phones kept going off, too. The morning game went late, to the point that if we wanted to go to the dining room, we’d be catching the end of the lunch period. We did, and turned out that the dining room, on the first floor, had gotten flooded from the rain. But we were able to place a takeout order and ate our ‘BBQ burgers’ and carrot cake back upstairs.
We decided to watch another movie rather than going out. I looked at my list to see if I could find a funny one and, although we weren’t aiming for a WWII-themed film fest, decided to try Kelly’s Heroes.
This turned out to be an entertaining watch, though flawed. It was vaguely funny, but a lot more violent than we were expecting. Clint Eastwood doesn’t have a lot to do but be the straight man. Savalas and Rickles are both really fun. Nice to see up-and-comers in the cast, although I didn’t recognize a young Harry Dean Stanton. Stuart Margolin has a really big part, actually. I kept looking for Gavin MacLeod and not recognizing him. Carroll O’Connor has a very funny tour-de-force small role.
I think the reason I’d put it on the list was back when Donald Sutherland died, they mentioned this film and it sounded intriguing. Sutherland is hilarious as a completely anachronistic hippie-character (in a movie set in 1943) who’s a tank expert. Just delightful, but so bizarre – makes absolutely no sense. Some of the background music songs are also very much of the movie’s time (1970) and not the movie’s historical setting.
Anyway, worth the watch as long as you know that this is not a great movie. Interest contrast to The Guns of Navarone, that’s for sure.
By dinnertime, the weather had cleared up, was actually quite nice out. We went out for Chinese, and there was a Chinese restaurant where Dad remembered, but it wasn’t much of anything, so we went to the Italian place next door, where Dad had eaten before. That was a nice meal. He got the calamari diavolo, which was right on the edge of too spicy (for both of us), and I got a Caesar salad and penne a la vodka. The caesar salad was one of those “dump some romaine and croutions in a bowl, then put a ramekin of gloppy fake Caesar dressing alongside it. Not what I was hoping for, but I definitely had been light on the veggies and salad up til then, so … and the penne was really nice.
Back to Dad’s for ice cream, then said goodbye for real, as I wasn’t going to see him on Monday.
Back to the room to find out to my enragement that they once again didn’t turn over the room. OK, I have grown to expect every other day, but this was now two days in a row, which meant essentially they hadn’t ever touched the room since I checked in. I will have to review my reservation to see what I should have been expecting, but I was pissed. I still had clean towels, but again, no real coffee. And, like, how do I tip now? For service I never got? (I ended up tipping for one day.) A shame, because I liked everything else about the hotel.
The plan for Monday was to clean up, eat, check out and head over to my brother’s. We were maybe going to go for a walk, and the weather was beautiful, but I was a little overdressed and knew I’d get sweaty, which wasn’t ideal when I was then going to be in an airport for hours, and then on a plane. We stayed in instead and Sam interviewed me for a ‘gay elder’ podcast he’s creating.
Perhaps next time I’ll look at the camera!
That was interesting, and I got into some really deep stuff and now I’m realizing I hope he does some judicious editing, heh. For the record, even though I’m a middle-aged gay guy and probably do qualify as a ‘gay elder’, I don’t feel like one. And it’s not like the young’uns are coming to me for advice.
Bye to Sam, tank up the rental car and off to the airport. A bit of panic when I realized that I hadn’t seen my passport since the day I flew down and wasn’t quite sure where it was. Once I got to the terminal, I brought my stuff over to an unused bank of chairs and some rummaging found the passport in a knapsack pocket which wouldn’t have been where I’d guess it was… anyway, no fear, and then then I checked in and went to the gate.
As we get closer and closer to the flight time, it’s clear that although things should be happening at the check-in desk, nothing was (at any desk) and clearly there was something going on. It turned out that not only were there some flight delays in other cities (and our plane was currently in NYC when it should have left a hour or so ago – I think the same plane just bounced back and forth between LGA and RDU all day long), but there were technical problems in RDU and in Austin. (turned out later it was this).
Bottom line – there were enough delays, being communicated scattershot through the app, through texts and at the desk, that I had time (and nothing else to do) to go get a late lunch. I went to an oddly frou-frou terminal restaurant and got a ‘smoked salmon tartine’ which was actually delicious, had just the right (small) amount of food, and came with sweet potato chips. I had a glass of sparking wine, too, figuring that a cosmo might make me too loopy to be on top of whatever was going on.
I didn’t have any special reason to get home on time, but I did want to get some things done and all in all, after four hours of flight delay, I didn’t get home until 830 pm, just in time to order a pizza and watch the news and a Ted Lasso before going to bed.
Anyway, a nice little trip, but not all that notable. It looks like maybe both Dad and Sam are coming up for Christmas, so we’ll have to plan that out. I’ll take them to “Oh, Mary!”, they’ll get a kick out of it.
Other bits. I’ve started watching spooky stuff for October. Had been sitting on and finally saw the famous gay-couple episode of The Last of Us, which was as impressive as I’d heard. (Yes, I cried. Lots.)
I also finally saw Weapons. The only thing I knew about it was that it was a horror movie involving children and that Amy Madigan won an Oscar for playing some bizarre old lady with red hair.
Anyway, I loved it, that was a ton of fun. I might watch “Good Boy” next.
And we have publicity photos for 1776 tonight. All the men had to shave. Ugh. Men are not supposed to be clean-shaven, in my dreamworld at least.
