Planning Ahead

Last year, Lisa and I went to Long Beach WA after leaving the ham convention in Seaside for our now-traditional trip to the large pinball palace located there. It's only open weekends and holidays 11-5. But it wasn't open at all last year because the shop next door had caught fire a few days earlier and they were closed for repairs. I called them last weekend to confirm that they did in fact reopen. So the bottle of quarters is stashed in my van as we make our plans to maximize pinball playing time on Sunday. Unless Lisa's foot isn't up to standing, of course, although it appears to be getting better. She didn't have to use the electric buggy when we went the grocery store yesterday, for instance.

That's an Improvement

Some of you will recall my annoyance with the Holiday Inn Bakersfield, whose web site claimed that it had a free shuttle to Amtrak but did not, and where I incurred $24 in unexpected taxi fares. I complained to Holiday Inn corporate, and this morning I got a call from the hotel manager, who says that if I send her copies of the receipts, they'll reimburse me for the cab-fare. She apologized for the inconvenience. She said that she asked corporate to correct the web site; it hasn't been changed yet, although it may be asking too much for such a change to happen quickly in a large organization like that.

Still, I appreciate the offer, and when I get back from Seaside next week, I'll fire up the scanner and send them the receipts. Nice that they do value my custom sufficiently to deal with the mistake.

Return to Seaside

It was a fairly uneventful drive from Mehama to Seaside. We left Mehama about 1 PM and were moved into the hotel room at 5 PM. Our only hitch was several miles of slow traffic on US-26 due to an accident. Otherwise, we were pretty lucky. As we went west, we even got sunshine, as we've reached a 1 1/2-day break in the nearly-constant rain.

( Seaside in the Sun )

The hotel's pool and hot tub here are open 24 hours, which I think is a wonderfully civilized thing. In a few minutes, Lisa and I plan to see if a good soak in the hot tub will make her foot feel better.