Apollocon in the rear view mirror

Apollocon has come and gone once again, and I find myself with a cup that runneth over of enthusiasm and inspiration. This is a good thing, and the primary reason I find myself attending conventions these days. Writing is a solo endeavour, and the inherent isolation of the discipline can be wearying. New Braunfels, although being in the general proximity of San Antonio and Austin, is apart enough that I do not have regular writerly contact with other folk (other than online) and breaking this isolation, I have found, is essential to replenish the wellspring of creativity. This is partly in response to the stimulating flow of ideas that abounds, but mostly, I suspect, from my deep shame that everyone else appears far more productive than I.

After having missed last year's edition due to conflicting obligations, it was good to reconnect with the Houston crowd, which differs in subtle ways from the Armadillocon and Aggiecon folks (although there is some natural overlap). For dinner, I tagged along with John DeNardo, Stina Leicht and Lawrence Person to the Cajun Town Cafe for some pretty darn good eats. Food, as everyone knows, is an integral part of the full con-going experience.

I admit to some trepidation in the early going. There were a variety of SNAFUs with scheduling, such that until Thursday night prior to the convention, I was not included on any programming. Fortunately, their crack team of pencillers-in got to work and before long I had a full slate of scheduling on which to hold forth. My contributions to Friday's Cthulhu panel were modest, since I've read only a few Lovecraft stories, but I did manage to enlighten the audience on the existence of Shoggoth On The Roof, which alone is worth the price of admission. Running hard all day, plus my general lack of sleep from the week before, caught up with me and I ended up calling it a night relatively early in the evening. Having only one real room party going on made the decision easier.

Saturday got off to a sluggish start. My energy levels were low and overall I simply felt run down. I gave it the old college try during my three panels, but if I'm being honest, the audience is fortunate there were so many other knowledgeable folks up there on the dias with me, otherwise the discussion would've spiraled downward very quickly.

Once evening rolled around, however, my fatigue seemed to evaporate. I attribute that to the great people around me. I had a fun dinner with Ann VanderMeer, Rocky Kelly and Gabrielle Faust as well as the dinner crew from the night before. Ann and I had some entertaining conversations, but surprisingly never once did The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities come up, despite the fact HarperCollins releases it in just a couple of weeks. I've not had the chance to hang out with Gabrielle at a convention before, but she was great fun. And Rocky is always an upbeat and entertaining fellow to have around--I can't imagine a better convention guest.

Somewhere along the line I found a few minutes to talk with Chris Nakashima-Brown about his planned revamp of the No Fear of the Future group blog, and caught up a little with Martha Wells, Bill Crider, Rhonda Eudaly, Alexis Glynn Latner and others, although the fleeting moments went by far too quickly.

That buoyant energy carried over to Sunday, even though there were many excellent room parties Saturday night, and I found excellent conversations at each of them. Interestingly enough, my last panel of the con, Fire off! The Science Fiction/Fantasy Canon, proved to be the most entertaining and engaging of the weekend. With Alexis, Lawrence and Larry Friesen (Bill Crider had to leave early and missed it) we had a grand time pulling up a wide range of yesterday's classic authors and stories to give a sweeping list of worthwhile reading for someone looking to be well-grounded in SF and fantasy literature. Dante's Inferno was one early example, and we touched on a good number of 19th century writers before we even got to Verne and Wells. My contributions included Cilfford Simak, Leigh Brackett, James Tiptree Jr., Peter Beagle, Jack Vance and A.E. van Vogt. Others brought up Stapledon, Blish, Ballard, Dick, Zelazny, Burroughs, Kuttner, Le Guin, Norton and Lafferty, plus all the giants one would expect us to touch on. Interestingly, we often recommended reading works that weren't their best-known or most successful simply because some of those more famous works hadn't aged well. We were all struck silent for a moment when we realized that a significant amount of Greg Egan's work is now more than 20 years old, thus qualifying for "classic" status.

There didn't seem to be quite so many regional writers this year as in the past, but this was more than made up for by the steampunk contingent, a literary-cum-fashion movement that shows no sign of abating any time soon. And that's fine with me, as I find the retro-futuristic style endlessly entertaining. I also learned that, yes indeed, all the other writers and artists participating are far, far more productive than I, and I need to get my lazy butt in gear and stop wasting so much of my limited writing time typing out blog posts about conventions I've attended.

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Chicken Ranch Central

Off to Apollocon!

I'm packed up, and in a few minutes will be heading out on the three-hour drive to Houston for Apollocon. It's a measure of my dedication to this convention that I will be making the journey sans air conditioning in my vehicle. In an exercise of bad timing, that gets fixed next month. But in the "be thankful for small favors" category, my windows--which had also stopped working--are now fixed. Rest assured, I plan on showering before hitting the con.

For those of you heading to the con and interested in catching me at one of my scheduled panels, here's my schedule:

• Friday
  
  • 9 p.m. Cthulhu 101: Miskatonic University - Linda Donahue, Lawrence Person, Jennifer Ramon, A. Lee Martinez (M), Jayme Blaschke
• Saturday
  
  • 10 a.m. Reboot, Reuse, Recycle: Derly Ramirez, Gabrielle Faust, A. Lee Martinez (M), Jayme Blaschke
    
  • 1 p.m. Writing is a Muscle--It Needs Exercise Too: Linda Donahue, Michael Bracken, Rhonda Eudaly, Jayme Blaschke
    
  • 3 p.m. Reading to Do List: Kathy Thornton (M), Larry Friesen, Marianne Dyson, Cathey Osborne, Jayme Blaschke
• Sunday
  
  • 11 a.m. A Room of One's Own: Michael Bracken (M), CJ Mills, Rhonda Eudaly, Jayme Blaschke
    
  • 1 p.m. Fire off! The Science Fiction/Fantasy Canon: Alexis Glynn Latner, Bill Crider (M), Larry Friesen, Lawrence Person, Jayme Blaschke

A full schedule and panel descriptions may be found at the Apollocon website. See you there!

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Friday Night Videos

I've never been a huge fan of 10,000 Maniacs, although I readily acknowledge Natalie Merchant's talent. Their acoustic version of "Because the Night", with its full orchestration, is sublime. It shows how powerful a rock sound can be without electric guitars and the like. Good stuff.



And for those purists out there who scoff because 10,000 Maniacs aren't Patti Smith, here's the original:



Previously on Friday Night Videos... Pat Benatar.

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Chicken Ranch Central

The 2011 Griswold Family Vacation pt. 7

When last we saw our family of intrepid vacationers, London Bridge was receding rapidly in the distance, with the grand vistas of Arizona beckoning. You gotta watch out for beckoning vistas. They'll get you every time.

Having lost a good bit of time due to our detour through Joshua tree country, we reluctantly scrapped plans to travel an isolated loop of Route 66 and instead contented ourselves with a brief stop in Seligman, the town that partly served as inspiration for Radiator Springs in the Pixar film Cars. After some ice cream and corny jokes from Juan Delgadillo's Famous Snow Cap Drive-In, we were on our way again, hoping to check-in to our hotel in Flagstaff with enough daylight to spare to make a side trip down to Sedona. As we approached Flagstaff, though, an ominous sign appeared in the skies.

Coconino National Forest was burning. We could see the smoke billowing through the mountains from a hundred miles away. Spotter planes were flying around constantly. That image above? That's taken from the parking lot of our hotel in Flagstaff. The fire was roughly south of us, but we couldn't find out how big it was, how dangerous, or whether the road to Sedona was closed or not. We decided to chance it anyway, and headed out to Sedona.

I have to say, nothing prepared me for the following 45 minutes. The fire turned out to be some distance west, so our route was clear. And spectacular. I've never driven so many switchbacks in my life, and the forest, mixed with mountains, desert and spectacular stone formations was unbelievably gorgeous. We were racing the daylight to reach Sedona, so there was little opportunity for photography. I got the above infrared image when we pulled over so The Wife could take a few landscapes, but I have to admit that infrared doesn't do the area justice. We arrived in time for a magnificent sunset, then had dinner at Burger King and headed back to Flagstaff... in the dark. Not as much fun going up those switchbacks in blackout conditions, I assure you. One thing The Wife and I agreed on is that we really, really like the Flagstaff area, and need to head back to Sedona some day to spend a week or so exploring and shooting the unbelievable scenery. The hippy-dip, New Agey stuff they've got there, not so much.

The next day we were off again, with a jam-packed itinerary that included "Standing on a Corner in Winslow, Arizona" and a detour through Holbrook for our Route 66 fix. We drove through Holbrook gawking at all the fiberglass and plaster dinosaurs at the rock shops. Before we got that far, however, we stopped at a dinky little tourist trap known as Meteor Crater.

The kids quite enjoyed Meteor Crater. It's sheer size impressed them. They liked running through the junk shop, desperately begging us to buy them every piece of over-priced memorabilia they saw (some of which, I have to admit, was pretty cool for over-priced memorabilia). But the big hit with all of them was the computer "Impact simulator" they found in the museum. Essentially, you select the size of space rock you want to hit the Earth with, then select how fast it's traveling, and what angle it hits. They all worked hard to figure out what it took to destroy our planet. Then repeated this destruction many, many times. Ah, science!

Flaming destruction of the Earth paled in comparison to the Wigwam Motel in Holbrook, however. There's supposed to be one of these restored in Wharton, as well, but as I haven't been to Wharton in more than 20 years, this one was quite cool. Parking all the vintage cars along the teepee rooms was a nice touch.

Little did we know that more Route 66 goodness awaited us inside Petrified Forest National Park. After our disastrous experience at the Grand Canyon, and the kids' restlessness during our foray to Sedona, The Wife and I seriously considered skipping the Petrified Forest all together. But we'd skipped it for time constraints on our honeymoon and always regretted that. Plus, the kids insisted they wanted to see it. If we skipped it again, the rest of the day would be one long, tedious push to Roswell, New Mexico, with nothing to break it up. So we said "What the heck?" and made for the Petrified Forest.

Now one thing you don't realize before you go in is that the Petrified Forest also encompasses a good portion of the Painted Desert, which butts right up to I-40 but because of a fluke of the landscape, isn't visible at all from the highway. And the Painted Desert is breathtaking at any time of the day. Sadly, early afternoon with a bright sun blazing down through a cloudless sky is the absolute worst time to try and photograph it. Had we the time to set up for a sunset or sunrise shoot, you would be singing our praises as landscape photographers to rival Ansel Adams. As it is, you just have to take our word for it. But then, right before we crossed over the Interstate, we came upon a relatively new addition to the park: a 1932 Studebaker sedan commemorating the section of Route 66 that once ran through the park. Serendipity is fun, you know?

It didn't take long for the trip through the National Part to revert to form. Being midday, lighting conditions were awful for any landscape photography, although a few closeup shots of petrified wood produced pretty results when clouds passed overhead, such as the shot above. But as soon as the kids realized that the Petrified Forest didn't consist of upright stone trees, they turned surly. They complained when we took a side road to drive through a section of multicolored badlands. The trip through the Jasper Forest and Crystal Forests generated louder and more aggressive rebellion. Things came to a head when we stopped at Newspaper Rock to view the petroglyphs. Monkey Girl and Fairy Girl began to squabble over a mounted set of industrial strength viewing binoculars along the observation railing. Squabbling loudly. Which escalated to screaming and pushing, even after they were warned. Oh, yes, they were warned. Do you have any idea how far shrill girl screams carry across the open desert? Every tourist within 50 miles turned to stare at us then, wondering who could be such awful parents to raise such wretched children. They were banished to the car, in a very arbitrary and unfair way (as they put it) by their parents. Where their argument escalated, if you can believe it, to the point where two Park Rangers stopped their vehicle in the parking lot, got out, and discussed amongst themselves whether they ought to intervene or not. We fled the park, trailing humiliation and shame, stopping only at the southern visitors center long enough to A) use the restrooms and 2) have our kids tell us how terrible we were as parents because we wouldn't buy them any souvenirs. At that point The Wife and I began planning our 2012 vacation without children.

As we drove south along U.S. 180, a particular thundercloud in the distance was showing uncommon persistence. I found this curious, as we'd seen only fleeting cumulus clouds throughout our trip. The weather remained bone-rattlingly dry, yet this cloud actually appeared to be growing. Remember the "That's no moon, it's a space station" moment from Star Wars? We had one of those once we realized it wasn't a rain cloud, but rather a smoke cloud. Remember the day before (scroll up to that first picture in this blog post if you have to) when we couldn't find out any information about the fire in the Coconino National Forest? That's because all the news broadcasts were focused on the Wallow Fire in the Apache National Forest, a monster blaze even back on June 3 which is still going strong even as I type this three weeks later, which has since grown to become the largest forest fire in Arizona history. And we were driving straight into it.

Panic doesn't set in. Rather, there's a growing unease as we check the map and our route. We should be fine. We turn east on U.S. 60 in Springerville. That's 20 miles north of the blaze and takes us into New Mexico. The fire hasn't spread into New Mexico yet. We're good. No problems. Hey, let's pull over and take some shots of this oddball antler tree just to show how relaxed and unworried we really are. Let's double-check that map and make sure that fire's 20 miles to the south. Did you hear they've evacuated the town of Alpine? The roads turning off to the south suddenly start sporting barricades. Rest areas are closed. As we drive through Springerville, there's an eerie calm. Only emergency vehicles are on the streets, with a few long-haul tractor-trailer rigs passing us in the opposite direction. We watch as the smoke cloud overhead blots out the sun. The fire's 20 miles to the south, we repeat. Yeah. We're good.

And then we descend into hell, or at least an apocalyptic wasteland. Ash falls like snow. Everything smells of smoke. And it gets darker. And darker. Outside, it's black as night, only worse. Instead of stars, an angry red glow appears over the ridge to the south. That can't be the fire, can it? Did it jump into New Mexico? Then the glow spreads, first behind us, then to the north. Eventually, we're completely encircles, a glowing ring of fire just behind the next ridge in every direction. It's the sun, we decide. Yeah, that's the ticket. The smoke is diffracting the sunlight to make it look like we're trapped in the middle of a ring of fire. Spooky.

We drive under that cloud for two hours. I now know how the citizens of Minas Tirith felt when Sauron's fell cloud billowed out from Mordor. But as we'd surmised, the evil red glow was a trick of the light, nothing more than nature's smoke and mirrors. We reached the other side of the smoke cloud to find blue sky waiting for us, civilization still intact, Dante's inferno left safely behind. Still, after that experience, Clark W. Griswold can kiss my ass.

A full gallery of road trip photos can be found here.
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 1
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 2
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 3
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 4
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 5
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 6
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 8

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Chicken Ranch Central

The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 6

Leaving Las Vegas is not as easy as Sheryl Crow makes it sound. Because of a bewildering amount of construction on the south side of Las Vegas and that city's apparent pathological aversion to directional signs, we ended up on I-15 south rather than U.S. 95 south, an error that would've taken us to Barstow for the night, as opposed to Lake Havasu. Fortunately, we were able to hang a left onto 164 to take us back where we needed to be. We made a pit stop in Nipton, Calif., a tiny Mojave town that makes Luckenbach look like a major urban center. It was planted smack-dab in the middle of a desert basin wholly surrounded by mountains, a landscape that looked for all the world like it came straight out of the movie Tremors. Shortly after crossing the border back into Nevada, we met a sign announcing we were now on a scenic Joshua Tree highway. Which was great, except we were an hour behind schedule and as there was a substantial drop-off on either side of the road, pulling over wasn't easily achieved. Near a bridge over a dry wash we did find a shoulder, and got out for some (very) brief shots. My EF 50mm 1.8 lens, which had seized up earlier because of the sandstorm, threatened to begin working again. But it was only a threat. In the end, I managed to get only one shot, the image below, with my EF-S 10-22 lens. Not bad, but I'd hoped for so much more with these fascinating trees.

Amazingly, we made it the rest of the way to Lake Havasu City without any additional adventures. The place has grown dramatically since we last visited 15 years ago. Big box stores, outlets, fast food joints... Whereas London Bridge had been the main draw way back when, today it was relegated to a curious afterthought.

London Bridge (not to be confused with the more visually striking Tower Bridge) was built to span the Thames in 1831. When it came time for replacement, an American businessman bought it and had it shipped stone-by-stone to Lake Havasu, where it was reassembled in 1971 as the central attraction for a resort community. A tourist-friendly "English village" was built up around it with fountains (above) and an array of shops and restaurants.

Nothing lasts forever, though. The English village has definitely gone downhill since last we visited. Lots of vacant retail space was evident. We had lunch at an overpriced hole-in-the-wall pizza joint. Fortunately, the food was pretty darn good. Unfortunately, their vintage 1980s arcade games didn't have vintage 1980s prices.

We looked up the decline of the English village online, and you can probably guess what we found. The owner and the city got into a pissing match. The owner wanted to bulldoze the place and build condos. The city wanted to maintain the tourist destination. So the owner decided to let the place rot until the city gives in to his demands. Sad, but typical.

For every paddle-wheel steamboat like the one above still active in Lake Havasu, there's a closed dinner theatre or pub there on the waterfront. We wandered around in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week, and saw several dozen other tourists. Most of them were like us, desperately looking for some kind of entertainment around London Bridge and finding nothing. From what we could tell from the short-term rental advertisements, the Lake Havasu waterfront now caters more to college students looking to drink and party. Because goodness knows college students don't have enough places to drink and party as it is. But hey, at least nobody's lobbying to dismantle London Bridge itself... Yet.

A full gallery of road trip photos can be found here.
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 1
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 2
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 3
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 4
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 5
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 7
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 8

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Green Lantern

How do I write about Green Lantern without damning it with faint praise? I went and saw it for Father's Day with Monkey Girl, and we both enjoyed it. Did we love it? No. It's not a great film, but reading comments online, from regular folks and professional reviewers, there seems to be a good bit of gleeful dogpiling going on. To put it in context, I loved Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which was savaged by critics and ignored by audiences with an indifferent shrug. My all-time favorite movie is The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, which is Terry Gilliam's biggest career bomb. So yeah, I'm probably not a control sample. But I still don't like it anywhere near as much as those.

I'll tell you what I like it better than, though. It's better than both Fantastic Four movies, Daredevil, Batman Returns, Batman Forever, Superman Lives and Watchmen. The thing is, had Green Lantern come out just five years ago, before The Dark Knight raised the stakes and Marvel turned into a cinema factory in overdrive, it would've found the market much more welcoming.

Green Lantern is a conflicted movie. It tries to set itself apart from other comic book adaptations, but constantly references them. There's a brief Superman-themed birthday party for Hal Jordan's nephew, and for Hal's public coming-out as GL, he saves a helicopter from crashing, just like in the original Donner Superman. The big bad is Parallax, a yellow smoke monster that is so evocative of the ill-conceived Galactus revamp from the second Fantastic Four film that the only way viewers don't flash back to that earlier film is if they hadn't seen it.

The movie is paradoxically bloated and too short. Throughout the film, scenes feel truncated and rushed. Motivations and relationships aren't fleshed out. Entire sequences feel missing, as if they'd been left on the cutting room floor for time constraints. By the same token, a significant amount of what appears on screen comes across as pointless, time fillers to get the movie from the point where Hal gains the ring to the big finale when he saves the world. Tim Robbins is miscast as Hector Hammond's smarmy, too-young Senator father, giving the bulbous-brained Hammond generic "daddy issues" straight from central casting. But the real problem isn't Robbins, it's the fact that his character is even in the script. He's Max Schreck from Batman Returns, a pointless character sucking away screen time from the characters the audience actually wants to see. As it is, Hammond is a whiny prick with no plausible motivation who never comes across as a viable threat to Green Lantern despite impressive powers. His unrequited love for Carol Ferris is there only because that's the standard cliche in these kinds of movies. Angela Bassett is miscast as Amanda Waller (should've been Queen Latifah) but it doesn't matter because the character doesn't have anything to do. In just five minutes I've thought up a couple of alternate character arcs for those two that tightens things up and makes them more relevant to the story as a whole, but hey, when you have script-by-committee going, can you expect anything less?

I also was put off by the elevation of Geoff John's more recent GL contributions from the comics becoming elevated to canon status in the film. The whole "emotional specturm lanterns" idea is silly and takes contorted logic to justify (hint: "Willpower" isn't an emotion, folks), but mainly it takes a simple SFnal concept lifted from the Lensmen series and tries to flesh it out with needlessly complicated "midichlorian" explanations. But that's a personal gripe I'm sure nobody in the general theater-going audience will pick up on, much less care about.

The biggest sin of the movie is that it ignores the age-old writer's adage to "show, don't tell" and instead tells. Over and over again, it tells. The intrusive voice-over reminds me of an over-enthusiastic comics fanboy explaining everything about the movie to someone who didn't like it, then telling them how they're wrong. Ugh.

So, what then was good about the film? Quite a bit. Ryan Reynolds really gives it his all in the role of Hal Jordan and has you rooting for him despite some serious asshole behavior and a cringe-worthy "Hero's Journey" checklist he has to run through. It's clear he takes the role seriously as an actor, and commits to it fully. So help me, when he recites the Oath during the climactic battle against Parallax, I got goosebumps. That is Green Lantern. Once the fight leaves Earth, the imagination deserts the filmmakers a bit (who else wanted to see emerald green TIE fighters attack Parallax in the asteroid field?) but I've leveled the same criticism against the comics, so it's a wash there. The important thing is that by the end of the film, Hal Jordan was true to the character.

Blake Lively has taken much flack for her portrayal of Carol Ferris. I've never seen Lively in anything prior to this, and don't know anything about her other than she looks better as a brunette than a blonde. I found absolutely nothing wrong with her performance. Yes, for someone constantly angry at Hal there was more restraint than fire, but that may be as much the director's fault as Lively's. It was a generic, under-written "super-hero's girlfriend" role, but she gave it her all and made several moments her own, her discovery of Hal's secret identity being a particular stand out.

Kilowog and Tomar-Re are very, very charismatic when onscreen. Which is, unfortunately all too brief. Mark Strong is given nothing to do as Sinestro except posture and preen. When Sinestro "turns evil" at the end of the credits, it's utterly pointless and unwarranted, a ham-fisted tease for a sequel that will (in all likelihood) never get made if the anemic box office returns are any indication. Which is a shame, because there's a lot of groundwork laid here for a tremendous Green Lantern movie featuring the Corps and truly epic storytelling.

In the theater, Monkey Girl and I ended up sitting in front of a father and his son, who may have been about 7 years old. The father was a little younger than me, but I couldn't help but notice the audience was filled with men in my general demographic, guys who'd watched Super-Friends growing up and read the four-color adventures of Hal, Guy Gardner, Kilowog, Katma Tui, Arisia, Mogo and (saints preserve us!) G'Nort back in their younger days. This was our movie, and kids these day knew Green Lantern as John Stewart, if that. Yet listening to this little boy was just as entertaining as the movie, if not moreso. He believed. He shouted "Don't do it, Hal!" when Hector Hammond threatened to kill Carol if Green Lantern didn't surrender, "Watch out!" when Parallax threatened to crush Hal under the full weight of his tangible fear. There were no dodgy special effects for this boy, no plot holes, no miscast nitpicks. No, for two hours he was immersed in a universe of wonder, where an incredible array of aliens protect the 3,600 sectors of the universe as the Green Lantern Corps. Afterward, Monkey Girl and I discussed the boy's reactions as we did the movie itself. He made us smile, and ultimately, enjoy the film just a little bit more.

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Friday Night Videos

Today's featured Friday Night Video is "All Fired Up" by Pat Benatar. Because I haven't had enough rocker chicks here lately. This was one of the most popular songs played during Stampede hockey games back in my sportswriter days. I'm serious, they played this one every night. Fortunately, it's a killer song, and generally enough to cleanse my ears of the Spice Girls crap they also played every night. Enjoy.



Previously on Friday Night Videos... Sheena Easton.

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Chicken Ranch Central

The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 5

This is part of the reason my visit to Las Vegas was tolerable.

Yeah, that's right. A hulking wall of concrete. I guess I don't score points for originality. The Wife and I skipped Hoover Dam 15 years ago, mainly because we'd already taken a tour and rafting trip at Glen Canyon Dam upriver, but also because The Wife had "already seen it" ("already seen it" is a refrain as predictable as Old Faithful when it comes to anything west of the Mississippi with The Wife, pictured below. And yes, she's seen Old Faithful, too).

Just how severe the drought's been in the southwest is apparent by looking at the levels of Lake Meade. All that white rock around the lake? That's submerged when the lake's at normal levels. I shot these in infrared, but botched the aperture, so they're softer than I'd like. Nobody's perfect. I include the first image unprocessed beyond a little sharpening because of the odd phenomenon of the clock faces on the intake towers coming out bright blue in infrared. Quite odd.

Having skipped the Glen Canyon Dam and raft trip this time around, The Wife and I thought it'd be fun to take the kids on a tour of Hoover Dam. Until we saw the $30 price for tours. Egads! Then we saw the $8 admission just to get into the visitor center! The Wife couldn't get over how much the place had changed in the 20 years since she'd last been there. Before, there were just two pull outs on the side of the road for tourists to park and take photos. Now, those pull outs were cordoned off, with tourists channeled into a big parking garage connected to a snack bar and gift shop, with a big (and fee-charging) visitor center a short escalator ride away. Go ahead and call me cheap. Everything's a racket these days.

The Bug had plenty of fun, though. He picked out a Hoover Dam hard hat with a light on the front as his souvenir. As any kid can tell you, a hard hat with a light on the front is pure awesome. That hat made him "official" and he took command of the chains in front of the art-deco doors on top of the dam.

Last year a new bridge, bypassing the narrow, two-lane bottleneck over the dam, opened just a little way down river. It's visible in my photos. You see it, and say "Oh, a bridge." In person, though, it's terrifying. It spans an enormous chasm and only in person is it apparent how tiny the vehicles are that cross it, how high it is above the river below, and how freakin' windy that canyon is at all times. And get this: There were people walking on that bridge, going halfway out, taking their snapshots, and walking back. I've mentioned before how I'm not normally afraid of heights, but just watching them got me woozy. We did not drive across it.

The false-color infrared image of the dam and visitor center, below, reminds me of the miniature set pieces from Japanese monster movies. I expect to see Godzilla or Megalon attack the dam at any moment. Must be the colors.

I have to finish by saying that the Winged Figures of the Republic statues are quite impressive in person. The dramatic art deco look really added an extra oomph to construction projects back in the 30s, don'tcha think? The shot is, of course, infrared.

After gawking and photographing as much as we could without paying $38 per person for a tour, we piled into the car and stopped at Dairy Queen for Blizzards all around. Then I discovered my beloved 50mm lens had stopped functioning. The aperture was locked in place, seized up with grit in the mechanics. Geeze, where could that possibly have come from. I was finding it increasingly difficult to maintain my positive outlook.

The next day we left Las Vegas behind, headed out for the tourist Mecca of Lake Havasu City. And no, I didn't stop at the Chicken Ranch brothel on the way out of Nevada.

A full gallery of road trip photos can be found here.
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 1
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 2
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 3
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 4
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 5
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 6
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 7
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 8

Now Playing: Peter Gabriel Peter Gabriel 2
Chicken Ranch Central

The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 4

The trip from the North Rim to Las Vegas proved surprisingly uneventful. Fatigue and exhaustion probably played a significant role in that. We ended up skipping Pipe Spring National Monument, a fantastic historical site The Wife and I stumbled upon during our honeymoon road trip. We gawked at the unfinished houses in Colorado City of the Mormon tax cheats. We had lunch at a Del Taco in St. George (I hadn't thought of Del Taco since they ran a few commercials on Houston television in the very early '80s. I'd never eaten at one. The verdict? Nothing to write home about). Eventually we made it to Sin City, and this is where we stayed:

I'm a fan of fantasy and renaissance festivals, and enjoy medieval history, so this should've been the prefect hotel for the family to stay at. It would've been, too, if the Excalibur hadn't been the most half-assed of all the theme casinos in Las Vegas. That garish faux-castle facade? That's as good as it gets. Aside from the over-priced joust/dinner show that any renaissance festival can top, there just isn't much else here to back up the theme. There's some fake stonework through the foyers and a sad suit of armor here and there, but beyond that it's generic casino and Super 8 motel rooms. No, scratch that. Super 8 motels at least have refrigerators and coffee machines in their rooms. Excalibur didn't. They also wanted to charge 25 cents a minute for internet access. No thank you. The room really was pathetic when compared to the one The Wife and I stayed in at the Stardust, which was sadly imploded in 2006 and is now an abandoned construction site.

Las Vegas and I, it should be pointed out, don't really get along. My wide-eyed wonder lasted about two hours back when I first visited on my honeymoon. I learned quickly that I don't have the gambling gene. I don't get excited about paying $10 for watered-down drinks, $40 for mediocre buffets or $150-plus for whatever show I can catch in Austin next week for $30. The sleaze was a major turnoff as well--now, I'm a fan of the erotic, but Vegas can make donkey shows in Tijuana look classy by comparison. I'm more interested in the historical and quirky stuff. I wanted to visit the historic Las Vegas Springs Preserve, but admission was $20 for adults and $10 for kids. No thank you, again. We had to settle for the nos-closed Liberache Museum (which I got the nifty shot of above in infrared).

The fact that I'd agreed to spend an extra day in Vegas should no way be construed as my endorsement of the place. I took the kids to the pool and the rest of the time we went on little excursions to Hoover Dam and the like. We also took them to Caesar's Palace so they could see what a themed casino looks like when it's done right. And as much as I dislike Vegas, I have to admit I could spend hours admiring the architecture of Caesar's. The two false-color infrared photos of fountains above were taken during this outing.

About the only concession to the superficial glitz of Las Vegas I made was a photo excursion down the Strip to get in some night photography of the dazzling buildings. Above are two shots of the Luxor, which was right next door to Excalibur. As botched as Excalibur's theme was, the Luxor did the ancient Egyptian motif right.

Across the street was the MGM Grand, quite an imposing, if not magisterial, building. I didn't go in, but the outside certainly gave an impression of old-school Hollywood, back in the days when MGM was a real studio.

Across the street in the other direction was New York New York. It's every bit as gaudy and over-the-top as a Las Vegas casino can get, but very well done. The architectural effort that went into recreating the New York skyline is impressive. The Statue of Liberty replica is so good that it tricked the U.S. Postal Service into issuing a commemorative stamp picturing it rather than the real one in New York. There's even a Statue of Liberty made out of jellybeans inside.

Paris Casino was another example of well-done architecture. The fake Eiffel Tower at night is quite pretty. It's almost subdued when compared to the rest of the strip. The giant Montgolfier balloon with the flashing Barry Manilow billboard on the other side of the tower? Not so much.

You'll notice there are very few people in my photos. That's because there aren't that many people out and about in Las Vegas at 1 a.m. on a Thursday morning. The Wife and Monkey Girl went out and did some Las Vegas street photography earlier in the evening, and once they got back and we managed to get the kids settled, it was pretty late. Considering the photographic bust the Grand Canyon and Horseshoe Bend turned out to be, I was determined to get something in Las Vegas. So I grabbed the 50D (my infrared camera was pretty useless at night), my EF-S 10-22 ultrawide angle and a tripod and set out to get some long-exposure shots of the Las Vegas strip. I ended up walking far more than I'd intended, and was dog tired by the time I got back to the room. I'm disappointed I didn't get any shots of the now-closed Sahara before it's demolished, but you can't have everything. The important thing is that I spent two days in Las Vegas and came close to having a good time (mainly by avoiding all the stuff most people actually go to Las Vegas for), which is more than I can say about my two previous visits to the city. Ironic that Las Vegas, the stop on our road trip I was dreading most, turned out to be the least stressful two days of the entire vacation.

A full gallery of road trip photos can be found here.
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 1
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 2
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 3
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 4
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 5
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 6
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 7
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 8

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