Brooklyn to Las Vegas

Today's activities:

• Get up early (for a weekend, at about 7) to make sandwiches and snacks and pack up the usual backpack.
• Cajole my two sons -- Thing 1 and Thing 2, currently eleven and eight years old -- into getting dressed and having a little breakfast.
• Bundle said sons into my car.
• Drive to Coney Island, via the impressive Verazzano-Narrows Bridge, which my boys were awed by.
• Park at the New York Aquarium, using my family membership to get in free. (Parking, sadly, wasn't free.)
• See various sea creatures for several hours.
• Get out onto the Boardwalk -- the first time I've ever been to Coney Island, actually -- and have lunch at a randomly-chosen establishment there.
• Ride the Cyclone, which we were astonished to see was running. (We knew Astroland closed down last year.) It's rickety and rattlely and very much the old-fashioned wooden coaster, and we loved it, despite the possible brain damage due to all the shaking.
• Back to the car to drive up to Prospect Park. (Drive all the way around the park, due to missing the entrance the first time. Whee!) Park, for free, at the Wollman rink. (Though we didn't have the cash to ride on the paddle boats, due to the Cyclone and lunch running through my wallet.)
  
• Wander through the park up to the Bandstand, for a free They Might Be Giants concert in the late afternoon.
• Enjoy the concert, particularly since the threatened rain never actually hit.
• Race back through the park to the car, pretending a circling helicopter is searching for us. (We may, perhaps, have been watching too many Bond movies lately, but it kept us all moving when we were pretty tired.)
• Drive back home, catching a drive-through dinner along the way.
• Collapse briefly, and then pack.

Tomorrow I will get up far, far too early and drive to lovely Newark Airport (don't talk to me about Liberty at an American airport) for a 7:35 AM flight to Las Vegas, where the high temperature for the next four days is expected to be 107. Feh. I expect not to leave the Bellagio, where I'm manning a booth at the ACFE annual meeting, unless forced outside by fire alarms or something similar.

And then I'm back here on Wednesday, and I hope things will settle down a bit for a while.

So I don't expect any substantial blogging tomorrow. On the other hand, I may be spending a lot of time in my Bellagio room, which could mean I'll catch up on things. We'll see which it ends up being, won't we?

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Listening to: Josh Ritter - Golden Age Of Radio
via FoxyTunes