I’m back in the birthplace of Waffle House and Pappadeaux: Dallas, TX. Well, Richardson, TX actually, but who’s counting? And fine, okay, so Dallas/Richardson/Plano/whatever may not really be where Waffle House and Pappadeaux got started, but it’s where I first experienced these two fine examples of culinary excellence, so they’re what Dallas says to me.

Anyway.

So I’m here in Dallas. Just outside Dallas, in Richardson. Which is right next to Plano, where the client is and where I’m working, only my hotel is in Richardson. Which is a suburb of Dallas. Which is where I am, minus the long explanation. Land of Waffle House and Pappadeaux, as previously established.

Dinner last night was the ever-Waffle-icious Texas Cheesestake sandwich plate with the hash browns scattered, smothered, covered, and chunked at my favorite restaurant in the world, Waffle House. Tonight it’ll be crawfish etouffe at my other favorite restaurant in the world, Pappadeaux. Tomorrow will be hospital cottage cheese and jello after I’m admitted to the ER for completely clogged arteries and coronary disease. And cramping cheek muscles from a permanent ear-to-ear smile.

But for now, here’s the view:

Notice the young blonde hottie sunbathing by the pool. I felt like a total perv, taking her picture all surreptitious-like. But if I’m going to be honest, I guess I have to admit that taking 65 pictures was excessive. I’m kidding, it was only 64. But I should have stopped at 40. Everything past that was pervy.

…and here’s the room:

And now I’m off to either see a movie or buy a mask at Scuba Toys or shop for a Road King or … whatever.

This is supposed to be the View From Huntsville, AL, but Delta Airlines didn’t cooperate tonight. I missed my connecting flight here at ATL (by about 3 minutes, fuckinghelldammit), so now I get to write to you from Room 320 of the palatial (and really not all that bad if I’m being honest) Wellesely Inn & Suites hotel. For free, thankyewverymuch — not that Delta wanted to spring for it.

In a perfect world, I would have had about an hour and a half between flights when connecting through Atlanta tonight, giving me plenty of time to make my flight to Huntsville. But Atlanta got a little rain today, and when it rains in Atlanta Air Traffic Control loses their freakin’ mind and start diverting and cancelling flights. So my flight’s departure time out of Cleveland was delayed. First for 15 minutes, then for 30, and the final tally was nearly two hours. But still, if the flight had left when they tried to leave at the 2 hour mark, I would have made my connection. Close, running-through-the-terminal close, but doable.

But then the airplane wouldn’t start. I shit you not: they couldn’t start the engine. So they brought in an “aircar” that was supposed to somehow magically invoke a mighty wind that would huff and puff and blow the engine into starting. (But it probably wasn’t nearly as erotic as that sounded.) But the first aircar they got wasn’t a pro — couldn’t… um… “blow” hard enough. So they brought in the Big Momma aircar and she blew that engine good! Started it right up.

But it took half an hour, which ate into pretty much every second of flex time I had to dash from this flight to the next one once we got to Atlanta. And then when we finally got to Atlanta, they couldn’t park the freakin’ plane — our gate was occupied and we sat on the tarmac for another 20 minutes.

So the end of that part of the story is that when I finally got into the terminal and did my OJ run to my gate (the Hertz OJ run, not the crazy knife-wielding OJ run), I got there just in time to watch my flight leave. Last flight of the night, too.

Well.

So I’m stuck in Atlanta for the night. And I needed a hotel room. But here’s the thing about missing a flight and needing a room: the airlines don’t like to pay for it, even when it’s their fault. And they don’t have to pay if they can claim “force majeur” (aka “weather”). Which they tried to do in my case. Until I gave the nuclear smackdown to an escalating food chain of customer “service” agents who all tried to say “no” until I got to the top dog guy in the goofy red jacket. And I politely started my conversation with him by saying “I should warn you, I’m not going to take no for an answer” and then I proceeded to calmly explain that while my flight was indeed delayed by weather in the first place, I would have made the connection anyway if the freakin’ plane had started. Which was clearly a mechanical problem, and not weather. And that I still might have made my connection if my plane had been able to park once it got here. Which was clearly a parking problem, and not weather.

So to make a long story short, I am typing this in my comped room. And I get to go back to the airport tomorrow morning to try to fly standby on the 8 am flight, because I have 12 clients in Huntsville, AL who are expecting me to show up at 8 am tomorrow to train them. Fun, fun, fun.

Anyway, here’s the view…

And here’s the room…

And now I’m off to bed.

Greetings from room 202 of the Hampton Inn Erie South in Erie, PA. I somehow managed to get this room at a special rate — the Reflections of Lake Erie package, but I have no idea what the deal behind it is.

I booked the room online and selected the “best rate” option and this popped up at the same cost as the regular rate, but with a few bottles of wine and an in-room movie for free. When you use the words like “included at no cost,” then you’re speaking my language, so I’m staying here on the Reflections of Lake Erie package. Too bad I don’t drink — I have vouchers for three free bottles of wine from a local winery. The bad news, though: it’s a local winery. But I also have that free movie waiting, so tonight is Decision Time: King Kong, Big Momma’s House 2, or porn. It’s a tough call…

In the meantime, here’s the View From Here pictures for you to enjoy while I browse the “Adult Desires” selections (The Contractor, Xtra Filthy Sex, and Do My Slutty Wife, among others) and see if the maid left any hand cream in the bathroom.

Here’s the room:

And here’s the view:

And now… Movie Time!

Here’s a fun View From Here for a change. I went on a 2-day scuba trip over the weekend on the Conception Dive Boat and had a great time. I met up with a bunch of regulars from my local dive shop (Aqua Adventures Unlimited) in Santa Barbara for dinner on Friday night and we spent the night on the boat. Here’s the Conception’s bunkroom:

(Mine was bunk 4, the open one on the bottom left)

When we woke up in the morning, we were on our way out to the Channel Islands. We encountered a pod of either gray or humpback whales on the way and chased them around for awhile, and dolphins were all around us playing in our wake and bow waves while we did it. I managed to get a pretty cool shot of one of the dolphins:

Once we reached the islands we dove for two days around Anacapa and Santa Cruz islands. Here’s the view from the Conception on Day 2:

No scuba pictures this time — I was just trying to get back into the whole cold water diving thing, so I didn’t bring the camera housing. It’s just as well, too, because I really needed to pay attention to my buddy underwater. First because I was navigating for us and he had no idea where we were and kept swimming off in the wrong direction, secondly because he kept trying to kill me: He was spearfishing and almost stabbed me with the spear once, and later he almost slashed my throat with his dive knife while he was trying to dispatch a fish when a wave pushed him and he starting flailing around trying to keep his balance. I backed waaay the fuck off from him after that.

But we all survived and I got some good dives in and had a blast on my first liveaboard diving experience. They’re doing another one in June and I’m definitely signing up for it.

If it’s Wednesday night, this must be another suburb of Baltimore. And what do you know? It is! Here’s the view from room 610 of the Hunt Valley, MD Hampton Inn:

And let’s not forget the room:

I keep asking our sales team to focus on signing customers in the Caribbean and Florida Keys, but they just aren’t listening. Fuckers.

Greetings from San Jose, where I’m suffering from a persistent earworm of Dionne Warwick asking me if I know how to get here. There are a lot of different ways I could go with that, comedy-wise, but the bottom line is that I’m stuck in San Jose with Dionne Warwich singing in my head. I’m screwed.

But what the hell… At least I’ve got a view, right? Wrong:

Well, okay, but I have a nice room, right? Sort of:

It’s a handicapped room — my “closet” rod is three feet off the ground so my jacket’s sleeves are brushing the floor, and the shower has grab rails and a hand-held showerhead. But what the heck, my butt-crack has never been cleaner.

So you’re asking yourselves, Hey, Selves, I wonder how Chuck, Beth and Zoe’s fabulous Curaçao vacation is going? And because you’re an intelligent, discriminating person with an appreciation for the finer things in life — evidenced by the fact that you read this blog — you checked here to see if I posted a vacation update. And what do you know? I did!

So how’s the vacation going? I’ll let Zoe tell you from 40 feet down on her first “real” scuba dive:

Gotta go… Another shore dive beckons…

Curaçao, Day Three. So far, it’s all about the snorkeling. Zoe and I snorkeled all day yesterday, had dinner, then went back out for more night snorkeling with my underwater flashlights. Lather, rinse, repeat today. Beth has soaking up the sun and reading her book, but swears she’ll hit the water soon.

Zoe is becoming quite the little snorkel-hound. She has a sharp eye, too — she’s pointed out an octopus, a flounder, a cowfish (I think), and a moray eel that she tried to show me but was gone by the time I got there. She and Beth are going to do a “Discover Scuba” dive with the folks at The Dive Bus while I do a 2-tank shore dive. I’ll join them on my 2nd dive so we can dive together. It’ll be Beth’s intro to scuba and I’m not sure if I want her to like it or not — on the one hand it’d be great if she were as into it as I am so we could do it together, but on the other hand she’d expect me to carry all her and Zoe’s gear.

We’re renting a car Wednesday-Saturday so we can explore the island at our leisure and also to be able to get to Sunset Divers at the west end whenever we want — I’m probably going to do some boat dives with them, and we all want to snorkel their house reef. We’re having fun snorkeling here at the Hilton, but there’s really not all that much to see here. There, it’s supposed to be great.

Anyway, enough about what we’re doing/planning. It’s time for the View From Here. Here’s a very special View From Here, panorama-syle, from the balcony of Room 519 of the Hilton Curaçao:

And here’s the room:

And now… I’m off: Curaçao is calling…

So, yeah, Curaçao. Looking out the window, it looks a lot like Coral Gables, FL. Exactly like Coral Gables, in fact. Because we’re in Coral Gables, not Curaçao. At the Coral Gables Holiday Inn, in fact, and we’re here because we missed our connecting flight to Curaçao in Miami.

I could have booked us on a 6:30 a.m. flight with a 2.5 hour connection window, but no, I thought the 9:00 flight with the 45 minute window would work better because we wouldn’t have to get up so early. So we slept a little bit later this morning and then when we got to the airport we waited 2 hours for our flight to take off because something broke and they had to fly the part in from Las Vegas. The 6:30 flight would have gotten us to Curaçao right on time and I’d be writing this entry from there, and all the 9:00 flight got us was an extra hour or two of sleep and a comped room at a run-down Florida Holiday Inn.

Take my word for it: there’s no comparison.

But let’s continue my “view from here” tradition anyway, shall we? Here’s the view:

And here’s the room.

And because this is a family vacation, here’s Beth and Zoe living the life in Coral Gables:

I think the clocks here at the office are broken. My watch too, and the system clock on my laptop. They all seem to be moving backwards. It’s been 37 hours since my last post, but it’s only 2:15.