Orioles: Not My Home Team

Tuesday night, I made my first try at attending a weeknight Baltimore Orioles home game as a Northern Virginia resident. According to O’s owner Peter Angelos, this has always been an easy, convenient and reasonable thing to do, and therefore it was completely unnecessary for Washington to have its own team.

So let’s look at the timeline for a 1905 (7:05 pm) start at Camden Yards.

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Heidi and Josh's Guide to Yosemite

SOMEWHERE OVER TENNESSEE (June 6) — You’ll find lots of information about Yosemite National Park on the Internet. But for that unique mix of useless trivia, unvarnished opinion, and the very occasional useful tidbit you’ve come to expect from BTN, we thought we’d offer our own observations from half a honeymoon spent in the park or on its southern edge. So, without further ado, here are our suggestions for how to make your Yosemite adventure worth your while.

• Go during the week. Go during the week, go during the week, go during the week. I can’t emphasize this strongly enough if you’re a summer visitor. You’ll be sharing the park, especially Yosemite Valley, with every variety of tourist on Earth on Saturday and Sunday.
• That said, if you must be there over the weekend, try to do things on the edges of the park or outside it. The Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias (Sequoiadendron gigantium) is your best bet; Glacier Point is also a decent choice, as being 30 minutes off Highway 41 thins the crowd a bit. Make sure you have a Friday or Monday to do the valley.
• If the road is wide enough (usually in the valley), pull off if you see something, take pictures and enjoy it. Everyone else is doing it. If the road is wide enough, that’s the reason why. Trust me, the Park Service doesn’t make roads any wider than it has to.
• Speaking of which, road quality in the region, ordered by maintaining organization, goes from best to worst: Caltrans (California state highways), Forest Service (paved roads only), NPS. When you fly into California from any other state but perhaps Pennsylvania, you’ll think Caltrans roads are atrocious (complete with button-copy signs the likes of which the rest of the country hasn’t seen since the ’70s). You’ll learn better very quickly, hopefully not by straying over the three-inch shoulder the NPS provides.
• Also speaking of which, if there’s a big crowd pulling over suddenly along the valley roads, there’s probably wildlife wandering the meadow. Go ahead and stop, but leave yourself enough room in front of your car to get away quickly. Other tourists will cross the road and try to interfere with a mother bear and her cubs. This is your cue to leave, unless you’re looking to be interviewed on CNN under a “Tragedy at Yosemite” graphic.
• The valley meadows are full of standing water. You will, therefore, be mosquito food. Bring repellent, buy repellent, do something, but you’re playing for a tie at best unless you walk around in a mosquito-netting burqa. *Know your car. This is a challenge, since it’s probably a rental. Try to get a model you’ve driven before, though, unless you like guessing at where your right-side wheels are on the aforementioned three-inch shoulders. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to spring for the V6, either. You have a lot of climbing to do: 2000 feet from the Central Valley to your likely lodging in Oakhurst or Mariposa, 3000 feet from there to the park entrance, and perhaps another 2800 from Highway 41 to Glacier Point. *In a similar vein, many of the other people on the roads will have rented RVs they now realize they have no business driving on roads this narrow. They’re scared. They should be. You should be too. Take a turnout, take some pictures, and stay away.
• Tour buses are the enemy.
• Don’t trust the maps! They’re not always accurate, partially because the road network is itself a little bit odd due to some backtracking and closures to non-bus traffic. Signs are slightly more useful, and crowds are, unfortunately, the best.
• If you don’t see a waterfall, look again. One is there, you just missed it.
• Allow yourself lots of time to get from one attraction to the next. You’ll want to drive slowly to enjoy the view, and even if you don’t, other people will.
• Speaking of which, bring food and water. If you get hungry at 1:00 in the Mariposa Grove, you’re looking at 2:30 for lunch unless you leave the park and brave the entrance traffic jams again. Don’t leave it in your car, though! Once all the humans leave, your vehicle looks like a big, lonely metal lunchbox to bears.
• Don’t feed any other animals, either. Those signs are there for a reason.
• So are the signs on fences around trees that say “Don’t cross.” Trees have roots. Roots absorb water, water-dissolved minerals, and oxygen from soil. Your feet compact the soil, crushing out pore space where water and oxygen are stored. That hurts the trees. Don’t hurt the trees!
• Sunglasses are a must. So is a visor or a hat. You’ll be looking toward the sun a lot, so your face will need some time in the shade.
• That goes for your camera too: remember the lens hood, if your camera came with one. You’ll look rather funny trying to shield the lens with your left hand while shooting with your right, and you won’t realize some pictures need it until you download them and they’re washed out.
• Ask other people to take pictures of you. They probably want pictures of themselves too. Talk to them, they could come from anywhere from Carolina to Canberra. The ones from Canberra get ten weeks of vacation per year. Try not to get jealous.
• Also try not to get annoyed when the union tram driver talks about working a seasonal job and collecting unemployment for the rest of the year as her natural right. Save it for when the tram loses air-brake pressure 2/3 of the way through the Mariposa Grove, she shows no interest in calling for a replacement, and you have to walk back down.
• Glacier Point is not the place to talk loudly about your drunken escapades the week before. (Neither is anyplace else, really.) Kids can be loud, they’re having fun, but adults should observe quietly in wonder. Your model should be the elderly lady walking back towards the parking area who mused quietly, “This is the most spectacular thing I have seen in my life.”

Stay tuned for pictures! (Once we winnow the initial 5 GB set a bit…)

A (Travel) Day In The Life

This is the story of Friday, the beginning of my Arizona trip. All times are 24-hour (subtract 12 from hours over 12 to get the PM time), the name of the airline is unchanged to leave the guilty party unprotected. Photos will be available by the end of the week… keep your eyes on my Flickr.

0630 Eastern Time: Wake up. Boarding pass is already printed from online checkin last night for Northwest Airlines flights at 1715 from Washington Dulles (IAD) to Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP) and at 2155 from MSP to Phoenix (PHX). While electronics, shirts, and socks are packed, pants are not. Maybe I should pack some pants.

0830: Arrive at work. Work is work. I’d rather fly.

0900: Call Northwest, ask if I can stand by on the 1159 Reagan National (DCA)-MSP flight, even though my ticket is out of Dulles. This isn’t a problem when flying United or U.S. Airways. Customer service agent says no problem, just go to the airport and get yourself added to the list.

1030: Metroing myself out of here, with code on the USB drive that I can look at on the airplane.

1100: The Northwest check-in staff at DCA has a different opinion from that of their 800 number. No standby for me. I love wasting my time, especially when I called them in advance precisely to avoid doing so.

1130: Back down to the office parking lot, where I take one look at the building and decide trying the 1415 at IAD is a more enjoyable option than returning to work. Go TDI go.

1230: Arrival at Dulles, where the Northwest staff is more helpful, promptly confirming me on the 1415, since my original flight is badly overbooked, and placing me on standby for the 1715 MSP-PHX. In this process, they inadvertently cancel my reservation on the MSP-PHX late flight; resurrection of this ticket yields an exit row aisle seat. Cool. I’ll have to check in for that flight at MSP, but that’s no big deal — gives me a chance to scout the gate location at a brand-new airport for me in a brand-new state for me.

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San Diego Scorecard

And now it’s time for everyone’s favorite feature here at BTN, now illustrated for your enjoyment… the latest travel scorecard! Follow along at my San Diego Flickr photoset; not all are illustrated, but enough to make it exciting.

So, without further ado…

Friday

• Starbucks/home/Dulles 1, work 0
• Metrobus 5A 1, published schedule 0
• O’Hare weather 1, initial plans 0
• AAdvantage Gold status 1, oversold plane 0 (woohoo!)
• New DFW Skylink several million, old TrAAin -27
• DFW delays 1, re-scheduled early arrival time 0

Stereotypes on the Road

Thursday night at the new members’ class for the church I’ve been attending here in Northern Virginia, the volunteer leader made an observation on her holiday driving habits that I found rather insightful. Visiting family in Wisconsin, she said it took her three days to adjust to the rhythm of Midwestern country roads: not honking when it took the driver in front of her more than a second to react to a red light, expecting farmers to be out on a slow-speed cruise around the county, etc. That echoed my feeling of displacement driving from the Indianapolis Airport to Columbus, IN last Friday night, as I realized my recently-developed NoVA driving style stuck out like a sore thumb on I-465.

So Friday morning on my commute (40 minutes, only one major tie-up at the Dulles Connector/66 east merge), I thought about how I’d characterize the driving environment in several of the places I’ve visited recently, and decided it might be interesting to poll my readers as well, whether on these places or others they know.

So, to start off:

• Northern Virginia — the best way I’ve found to describe it is moderate aggression combined with a hair-trigger temper. Bad combination. In an ordinary situation, you can expect the average 703-lander to be rather impatient about stoplights, quick to change lanes without much advance signaling, and not too worried about proper following distance. All of that is somewhat anti-social, but tolerable. But the temper problem means that whenever traffic is bad (on the major highways, that’s from 6 AM-9 PM weekdays), people jump straight from zero to psycho in no time flat.
• Massachussetts — the term “Masshole” was invented specifically for drivers here. ‘Nuff said.
• South Florida — some of Dave Barry’s best columns, in my view, were about his hometown of Miami and what he described as the “craziness” of South Floridians. That description fits their drivers like a glove. You run the gamut there, from retirees who view 30 mph as an absolute upper limit, no matter the road, to Benzes, Lexuses and import motorcycles that draw no reaction as they fly down I-95 at speeds in the low triple digits. Anything can happen and usually does, so just be aware.
• Atlanta, on the other hand, is more predictable: where South Florida drivers are crazy, Atlanta drivers are just stupid. If you’re wondering what a driver is going to do, just figure the dumbest possible thing and get ready. They run the I-285 Perimeter like it’s the Atlanta Motor Speedway; they make right turns from left lanes across 3 through lanes of traffic and think nothing of it; blind curve passing/lane changing foolishness is just par for the course. And don’t even get me started on the 75-85 northbound split, where traffic engineers contributed to the problem. Looking at a map, you’ll see that 75 goes northwest and 85 goes northeast from the split point; the obvious solution would be for lanes for 75 North to split left and lanes for 85 North to split right, correct? WRONG — if you work for GaDOT, that is. Far better to reverse them and have the exiting lanes immediately cross over one another.
• Pennsylvania — these folks are actually remarkably calm, given the roads they have to drive on.

What do you think?