best laid plans
Well, my travel plans for the year 2021 are finally starting to get real: I booked two different hotels yesterday.
I actually booked this second, but the first little trip away will be a single overnight stay in Long Beach, WA—the very place Shobhit and I went for our anniversary last June, our first time out of the city after the pandemic began (all contactless checkin and checkout!)—for when both Dad and I go there for our annual Birth Week Bike Ride, this time to Cape Disappointment. This is basically just the very same plan I'd had for 2020, postponed a year, after it became clear that nothing would be open enough to make my initial 2020 "State Parks Tour" plan workable—and it likely still would not have been workable even if the state parks had opened by then, as that early on probably most of the people I otherwise would have met up with would not have been comfortable meeting even for that.
I may have some challenge even this year, which literally only occurred to me just as I was writing this—although I doubt I'll have much. Even though the pandemic continues even now, there are two major differences between April 2021 and April 2020: first, and most importantly, we all have a far better collective understanding of where the risks lay, and of any year for me to pick "State Parks Tour" as my Birth Week theme, 2021 is perfect for it, being all outdoors. (Yes, I know I just mentioned having booked a hotel room for one day that week: I'll be staying in it alone; Dad and I are not sharing the hotel room.) Second, in sharp contrast to last year, transmission cases are now declining, and in all likelihood will be declining even more steadily then than now, as we are in the midst of vaccinations being administered. It's still looking fairly unlikely that I will be vaccinated by the end of April, although there is a fair chance I will at least qualify by then. The point is, we'll be in a far different position then than we were last year, if not quite yet in a fully ideal one.
The only real difference, I think, is likely to be transportation. Even this may be reevaluated by then, but in all likelihood, I'll have to drive myself separately to state parks that are some ways out of town and meet people at them, whereas if this were a normal year I'd be likely to carpool in at least some of those cases. But of course that's something I can easily live with, as I certainly can still wearing masks if they remain recommended (and they almost certainly will be).
Much more significantly though, I booked my three nights at the Hercules Inn in Wallace, Idaho over Father's Day weekend—my first time staying there three nights rather than two since December 2015. When I stayed three nights that year, I did it to make up for not having visited in the spring for the first time since I started going twice a year in 2009; it proved to be way too much and I swore I would never stay that long again.
But! That was before Mom died, and this time Dad and Sherri will be there, which will make the visit far more bearable. Not necessarily due to the people I'm visiting, although I could still sort of get into the weeds with that if I wanted, but because when I was just visiting Mom and Bill—and remember, 2015 was before Christopher moved out there—our options for things to do were severely limited, due to their persistent chronic pain and mobility issues. Just sitting around all day at their house was not something I wanted to be doing for an extra entire day.
With Dad and Sherri there, we already have plans that basically themselves necessitated two full days there rather than my usual one (as in, three nights rather than two): after Shobhit and I walked The Trail of the Coeur d'Alenes for some ways last summer, I told Dad it would be a great place for us to take one of our bike rides sometime. And then, after I broached the idea of us visiting at the same time sometime with Dad, I also mentioned Shobhit and me having hiked a bit on The Pulaski Trail just outside of town and Shobhit cut the hike short because of bad footwear for hiking and it also being too late in the day, I suggested we go there too.
Dad did not want to do both of these in the space of a single day. How are we going to take a bike ride and do the hike and get my naps, he texted me, which cracked me up. I had actually been thinking maybe I could still hack only two nights by leaving early enough on Saturday to arrive midday and do one of those things that day, but it didn't take much for Dad to convince me to go for three nights—it just makes it all much easier, especially when you factor in that we'll all also be visiting Christopher and the boys as well, and Nikki and TJ will take their customary day trip down to visit (which they confirmed with me over Facebook Messenger yesterday). Becca says she wants to come but financing is always an issue for them; I'll be delighted if she and Tyler make it but also very surprised. And I don't want to turn into Grandma McQuilkin and render this short trip its own "Vacation Boot Camp," so, three nights it is.
Even though that will be all of one week after Shobhit's and my anniversary weekend, during which I am still holding out hope of visiting Portland—an anniversary trip idea now postponed two years in a row! And I figure that by June, a visit to Portland should be fine; I don't expect a whole lot of indoor activities outside our hotel even then, with the exception of the Portland Aerial Team, which with masks on and how relatively brief it is, I'm guessing will still be fine. I've been eager to do that for ages now, and otherwise, there's a lot of outdoor stuff to do down there as well: Multnomah Falls, a probably day drive to the Oregon Coast, and the like. Shobhit and I just need to settle on and book a hotel for that as well.
As far as I know, that only leaves a visit with Faith in Desert Hot Springs over Thanksgiving, which I am still hoping I can make happen. Although if things are as close to back to normal by fall as is being very tentatively predicted, perhaps I can finally get back to my regular fall overnight visit with Jennifer in Shelton as well. Time will tell.
So what about last night, then? I watched and reviewed my fourth movie in as many days, this time the horror comedy Freaky, which had a lot wrong with it but was still a lot of fun. I started it only minutes after ending my work day, as I told Shobhit I had a movie to watch and he said he would come home and make dinner—he got home at around 6:30, which meant eating dinner much later than usual for me, but that was okay. Shobhit used the rest of our containers of leftover pasta to add to the blended vegetable mix he created to make palak paneer, as well as rice. He did that while I wrote my review, and because he still had some time left to get the dinner done, I then did my Monday evening drive to the office to swap out receiver paperwork. I really hustled this time and felt like I made very good time, and by the time I got back, the dinner had only been ready for about ten minutes. And, it was very good.
We ate while watching Sunday night's episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, the deep-dive topic being meat processing plants and, not the horrible conditions for animals in this case, but horrible conditions for the human workers—especially in a pandemic. That show is almost exhaustingly depressing at times, and this particular episode really made me think about so many dystopian visions of a future where poorer people are truly treated like disposable garbage . . . and how the real world we live in now is actually very much like that, just depending on where you live. Dystopian novels and movies tend to paint a portrait of these environments as being fairly uniform across society, and that's just not the way it works. What if I just happened to be born, say, a Latino immigrant in a county with no employment options besides horrible shit like this? My entire universe would be wholly different from the one I exist in as a middle-class white guy in Seattle. Anybody who believes any part of American society is truly based on "meritocracy" is being willfully moronic.
Anyway. I'm now scheduled for an advanced online screening of another movie tomorrow night, so tonight I'm going to take an evening off from movies. Shobhit will have his Project Management class, so I'll probably do some work on my home video editing for uploading to Flickr.
[posted 12:29 pm]