Note: there are no pictures this week.

Last week and this week are all about vacations. Last week we firmed up our plans for Alaska. We’ll be flying to Anchorage Sunday, September 1. We’ll get into Anchorage late and stay overnight. Monday we’ll drive to the Independence Gold Mine, then continue on to Talkeetna, near Denali State Park (the southern part of the park). We’ll spend the better part of a week staying at the Talkeetna Roadhouse Hostel (includes the FREE Talkeetna cultural package!) We’ll spend time soaking up the Talkeetna atmosphere, hiking, and hanging out around Denali Park. We even have a day set aside for the obligatory bus ride in Denali National Park. Saturday, we’ll drive back to Anchorage. We’ll spend a couple of days in Anchorage, staying at the Camai B & B. Then we’ll grab an overnight flight home Sunday evening, Sept 8. All the reservations are completed. We’ve started the outfitting stage by going to REI and getting Danita a good pair of boots. (I already have a good pair of boots.)

We’re doing Denali “on the cheap” by staying 3 hours south of the national park, using modest accommodations  and skipping the expensive “adventures” (such as dog sled ride and airplane fly-over in the fog). Of course, “cheap” is relative. Alaska is expensive. We understand it will be an experience we will never forget. Roughly translated, that means we’ll probably spend a week slogging around in rain and mud, then come back and brag about the wildlife and scenery. “Modest” accommodations is also relative. Like most hostels, the Talkeetna Roadhouse has gone upscale. We will be taking advantage of one of their private rooms, complete with a queen size bed and a sink!

This week is spring break for UMBC. Danita is off Monday – Wednesday. We decided to tale a mini-vacation this week, right here in beautiful suburban Columbia. Between SOCA parties, restaurant coupons,  and our upcoming anniversary, we have an entire week of dinner out planned — except Thursday. I’m confident we’ll find a way to eat dinner out Thursday also. If you have any good coupons for the Baltimore area, please rush them to us! We even have a few breakfast restaurant meals planned.

We started the week out with a bang-up breakfast at Mimi’s. We got a buy-one-get-one-free coupon for our anniversary, plus a second coupon good for two of their huge muffins, absolutely free. That alone covers breakfast for today and tomorrow. Sunday is the toughest day for breakfast coupons. It’s pretty easy to find breakfast coupons for week days. We already have a buy-one-get-one-free at Bob Evans. This afternoon, we are looking forward to hearing Saint-Saëns’ Thundering “Organ Symphony”. The concert is virtually sold out, as it should be. This is an astounding piece of music, and it’s one of those pieces for which a radio broadcast or CD simply can’t come close to duplicating the experience of a live performance. The Baltimore Symphony Hall was built to accommodate a first-class pipe organ. Unfortunately, they never got the funds for said organ. But the reviews indicate that the electronic organ they are bringing in for this concert is an incredible piece of engineering. They might not launch a tsunami, but I expect we’ll be feeling the floor vibrate.

Bike rides are proceeding at a stuttering pace. The weather is better this time of year, but it’s not good enough to be able to take long rides. I got a moderate ride in last week. For me, that’s a 20-mile ride to lunch, then a 20-mile ride home. The ride was quite unusual. Normally, when I ride, I don’t see any emergency vehicles. On this ride, I saw 8. the first 5 were all at different times, were all going to different locations, and all had their emergency sirens on. The next 2 had emergency flashers on. The last one was just tooling down the road. I got a second unusual ride in Friday. I went to my bike shop on a rainy Monday morning to get some things I needed for the upcoming season. They didn’t have the gloves I wanted in stock. They ordered them for me, with the delivery expected for Friday. Come Friday it was down right nice out — 55 degrees and sunny. Of course it wasn’t possible for me to drive to the bike store in weather like that. But I had never ridden my bike to the bike store. I knew I would have to cross 3 Interstates, a major highway, Amtrack tracks, and the Baltimore Light Rail. This would make finding a good bike route a formidable exercise. So I went to Google maps, clicked the “Bike” button, and asked for a route. The route looked pretty good without changes, so I plugged it into my bike GPS and took off. The ride turned out to be all back streets and paved trails. I crossed the Amtrack tracks near BWI airport using one of the paved trails. The trail took me to a building. I entered the building and walked my bike across the tracks on a pedestrian / passenger bridge, then took an elevator down on the other side of the tracks. My hat’s off to Google Maps!

Life is more fun when it includes new toys. We have a cordless phone with three handsets. (Yes, we still have old fashioned telephone jacks in our house. In my defense, they are part of our FIOS service, so they aren’t totally old-fashioned.) The main unit plugs into a phone jack in the living room. This drives all three cordless handsets — one in the living room, one upstairs, and one downstairs.We got these phones way back when we lived in Kingsville. They’ve served us well,  but last week they started dying. The upstairs handset started going wonky, overcharging the battery. Then the display stopped working. We could dial a number, but it was impossible to see the number we punched as we entered it. I went on-line and found that the phone is so old they don’t sell handsets for it any more. It was definitely time for a new toy! The new phones were quite easy to set up, they work great, and they have a cool new feature. In the past, if I wanted to talk with Danita, and I was upstairs and Danita was in the basement, I could use my handset to page Danita in the basement. We almost never used the feature, because the handsets were numbered, and we had to know which number handset we wanted to page. With the new phones, we can give the handsets names. I don’t know how this started, but we started calling the basement the “Garden Level”. (The house is too up-scale to have something so common as a basement. Besides, the basement is finished as nicely as the rest of the house, and is a walk-out with a huge door and window. So it doesn’t at all feel like a basement.) Shortly after that, the upstairs became the “Sky View Level”. I named the handsets “Garden”, “Main Level”, and “Sky View”; making the paging feature useful.

Well, that’s a lot of news for one week. I have to hurry up and finish this so I can get back to mini-vacationing. I hope this finds everybody doing well.