I, royal sitter of the interstate bus tour, supreme consumer of fast food and Chinese buffets, inhabitor of traveller’s motels and occasional pitshops, do hereby record the following of my journeys.It’s the fourth day of my Midwest travels, and writing this post grants pleasant relief from the tedium of the rolling hills and grass that dot the landscape. There’s a lot of road to travel, and we’re currently spearing through two states to get from Mount Rushmore to Yellowstone National Park. It’s certainly been a tiring but mostly boring journey.
I’m not really complaining or whining about it, though; after a few days of riding, I’ve realized that the Midwest is a fairly large and boring place whether you go through it yourself or with someone else at the wheel. Landmarks and points of interest are far from one another, and if you’re going to come up here you might as well hit everything noteworthy along the way in one go so you wouldn’t have to do it again. A bus tour alleviates some of the joyless driving and allows for a lot of sleep when you’re only getting 4-5 hours every night (though our collective pities go out to the bus driver).
Being on an Asian bus tour, though, has its quirks: it’s a federal mandate to board every bus with a loudmouth, talkative and outright bitchy older lady (i.e., “auntie”) that will leech the very life out of you if she decides that you speak her language or even remotely understand it; every rest stop feels like a Chinese invasion of restrooms and liberal looting of anything free; anything that may be unexpected (e.g., a thunderstorm, wild animals crossing the street) will give rise to its own short thunderstorm of camera flashes and awed “waaaah”s.
Worse, my parents are somewhat disappointed because I don’t exhibit the same kind of stereotypical behavior and interest in what I consider to be, I guess, mundane.
So it continues, another three days of exciting non-stop bus-riding action. I’ll try to post a few more select pics as I sort through my dad’s digital albums and pics. For now, though, I’ll post these last few; they were taken as I was under a heavy barrage of rain and hail (you can see it starting by the droplets on the pond in the first one), risking my life to take what turns out to be overexposed quickies.
Stopped over at Wyoming tonight, but thankfully motels in small towns in the middle of vast plains of nothingness are happy to give away free wireless internet access. Here’s a few pics from today, taken from my dad’s cool Nikon SLR:
By my count I’ve sat in the bus 18 hours and in vistas or rest stops around 7 hours; the past 2 days have been a blur of featureness terrain and DS gameplay.
I usually don’t post simple links in my journal entries, but I’m making one exception for something that I found uniquely funny. Dubbed nerdcore, it’s rapping about subjects of interest to geeks and dorks, which is an interesting – to use a mild term – juxtaposition of two very different things.For a sample of what such rap may sound like: one such artist, MC Plus+ (+0x0A point for the nerds who get the reference), has made his art free and downloadable online. The lyrics are along the lines of:
I’m encrypting shit like every single day;
sending it across a network in a safe way;
protecting messages to make my pay;
if you hack me you’re guilty under DMCA.
+20 points if you’re groaning along with the rest of his listeners, +062ul if you get the references.
If only they’re as cool as the above description. The one lesson I learned is that if your parents say they want to plan a trip to Hawaii/Florida and you don’t volunteer to do the planning, they sign you up for one of these.They certainly seem nice on the surface – for only a few hundred dollars, you get a ride on a comfortable tour bus, a tour guide that’ll know how to get to the touristy spots, and your meal locations/hotel stays all taken care of. It’s cheaper than if you actually plan the trip yourself and certainly less headache-inducing, and the only penalty is that you’ll be going at the tour’s pace and not your own.
Alas, that’s where trouble lies. It’s physically impossible to visit the locations suggested by said tour without establishing a pace that can only be described as painful and frenzied. The Japanese camera tourist stereotype applies well here, as you’re really only at any location long enough to take a picture and therefore proof that at one point in time, you occupied a space that’s in the remote vicinity of a space that happens to be famous. Apparently the enjoyment of travel is derived from photos and photos alone; as Sui said, you’re paying mostly for the privilege of the tour bus’s hospitality.
As you may have guessed, I’m not really looking forward to a trip this Saturday with my parents. We’re to hit the Sacramento capitol, Salt Lake City, Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone Park, and Reno in seven days, which means that I may come back with good photos to compensate for a vastly shortened and truncated experience.
On the plus side, I’ll probably be able to get a lot of reading done and finish a few games on my DS that I’ve neglected.
Upgrading a computer is like watching a prime time sitcom – you start of innocent enough, watch a few episodes, then a few more, until you’re downing entire seasons’ worth of content and holding week-long couch marathons. Then comes the period where you form a cone of quotes from the show and annoy everybody around you, hence prompting you to drop the obsession and pick up something else less addictive, like a…crime drama, say. Rinse and repeat.
Recently, price drops in computing parts of goodness have prompted me to look at means to turbocharge my machine and give it a swift, speedy kick in its metaphorical pants. As I said, chasing performance in personal computing can be an expensive, time-consuming, and if nothing else futile effort, but it’s damned fun while you’re doing deed.
