Gimme A Spring Break - Days 5 & 6

Medieval Times was the perfect wrap-up event for family vacation. It was brilliantly choreographed and built great drama to a crescendo finish for the roaring crowd. It was like Broadway theatrical meets WWE.

Not only was the show a nice surprise, but it was probably the best dinner I had all week. Like the middle ages there's no silverware, and everyone is served soup, garlic bread, roasted chicken, a spare rib, baked potato, and an apple turnover. After feasting on amusement park fare and fast food all week, I felt like a Lord of the realm feasting like a king.

But I lost the battle with the kids, trying to get them from chicken nuggets to the real thing. But you could make the argument that the battle had already been won earlier in the day.

Thursday was the only Disney portion of the trip, with a scheduled day at Blizzard Beach. It was a rainy morning and I had to break the kids' hearts and the water park was out. The protests were too loud to ignore, so I gave them one shot - if we left now. They complied and we got almost 3 solid hours on a wide-open, cooler day before the weather hit for real.

The traffic the final day was considerably worse. The first Friday in April was a mass exodus from the Tragic Kingdom - all the minivans headed back to North Carolina, Michigan, and everywhere else east of the Mississippi, and they all were at the the Chick-Fil-A drivethru and on Interstate 4 & 95 the same time as the Backtime Editorial Department. A 4+ hour drive home actually came in at a ++ 6 hours.

As with any family trip there were ups and downs, but when you bond for this long with your closest people, history only records the highlights. I didn't have time to relax and watch any of the Yankee games this week (thank goodness). And I had to order The Walking Dead and Justified season finales on Amazon.com (in an upset, Justified was actually the far superior hour). I also couldn't realistically stick to my diet or exercise properly.

And after the kids got 6 hours of movies, video games and snacks while I drove us back home in the traffic and the rain, I dropped them off with their Mom. But my day of driving was far from over. I-95 would test my fortitude once again. Much more on that tomorrow...

Postcards From The Edge (Of The World)

It should be noted that while South Dakota boasts Mount Rushmore, none of the presidents pictured are actually from there. And it would be hard to imagine they ever visited since statehood was achieved in 1889, part of America's manifest destiny.

This is my fourth straight year making the expedition to SD, always in early March, and it's always been cold and most often bleak though there were some periods of sunshine on this trip.

This time I thought I'd be smart and instead of taking 3 flights from Savannah to Sioux Falls, I took only a mere connection to Omaha to spend Sunday night at some familiar haunts down in the Old Market.

But I naturally flew into Omaha during the worst snowstorm of the season. It was one of the bumpier and more disconcerting flights in recent memory, but we made it.

Most of my old watering holes had already closed up shop when I plowed the GMC Terrain rental downtown at 11 PM. I found myself parallel parking through 6 inches of snow outside Old Chicago. Just like old times!

I walked in and there were about 50 people inside, it was fully staffed, and the kitchen was still open for another 90 minutes. The prevailing attitude was "Storm? Is this all of it?" I got my sandwich to go and was able to check in to my hotel ahead of the re-air of a great Walking Dead episode. Rick's sitdown with The Governor was classic television.

I woke up and predictably the Omaha street clearers had been out in force pre-dawn, and the mounds of snow had been pushed aside.

I went to the place where I got my coffee most every day between 2002 and 2004, the 13th Street Coffee And Tea Company. The same young woman was still working there. She remembered me but not my order.

In fact not much has changed in the upper midwest in the last 10 years. There's better coffee now, especially on the lonely highway truck stops between Omaha and Sioux Falls on desolate I-29.

The drive wasn't too bad, but it was pretty slushy. I almost went to get the rental car washed. But I arrived undramatically at my destination, and got something out of the trunk.

It's A Human-Eat-Human World

For three seasons, The Walking Dead has focused on the human stories amidst a zombie apocalypse. While the show sometimes wanders (much like a "walker") into the melodramatic, with overzealous family ties and love triangles, we always knew who the real bad guys were.

But now the zombies have gone beyond extras, they're more like mosquitos that either bite or are swatted away. The survivors' real enemies are other survivors, battling Lord Of The Flies style for the few inches of safe haven remaining on earth.

The past episode, the week before the highly-anticipated Season 3 Mid-Season Finale, titled "When The Dead Come Knocking" was by far the most gruesome and tense hour so far. People from Rick's "Team Prison" and The Governor's "Woodbury" have finally intersected. The toughest badasses left on earth are colliding off each other in Darwin's petri dish.

Lines of human courtesy have been crossed and the body count will surely mount further as a result. If you're a backwoods scrounger and get thrown to the herd, that's on you.

It's gotten to the point where every new "living" character is reminiscent of the nameless crew member on the Star Trek Enterprise away team, and you just know they're the next to get it. But as we've learned, no character is safe in this world, even if they're listed early in the opening credits.

Back On Home Land

This is the picture in my mind when I'm away too long. But my return home wasn't a beautiful Savannah day - it was gray and cold and dreary. My lawn is brown, the paint is peeling, and it looks more like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil at high noon.

It didn't help that there wasn't really time to manicure anything. Between conference calls, lunch with the kids, errands, sorting out upcoming travel, setting up a birthday party, filing expense reports, and getting back in the swing at karate class, I only had time for one thing at home:

I figured it was now 9 days after the election and I didn't want to be accused of spiking the football, so I  finally picked the souvenir up off my lawn. I'll just wait by the phone for the Smithsonian to call.

When I settled down tonight I ordered a pizza, cracked open a Stone IPA and got caught up on Homeland. While I think Claire Danes's portrayal of Carrie Mathison is a little overdone, Damian Lewis as Sgt/POW/terrorist/Congressman Nicholas Brody is phenomenally layered and conflicted.

I like the second season better than the first, as the intrigue of Brody being a double agent is really reaching a boiling point. But there's still silly romance and family drama. If I'm going to watch a soap opera, it better have a lot of zombies getting decapitated on a weekly basis.

Although in the real-life intelligence community, it would seem that there's plenty of love affair sleaziness to go around. One pundit on whichever cable news outlet described the Petraeus fiasco as "The Real Housewives of CentCom." Maybe I'm too hard on these shows that romantically link all their main characters. Maybe life does imitate art after all.

When It All Crumbled: The 2012 Tipping Point

It was shortly after Midnight, Sunday morning October 14th. A freak play in the 12th inning cost the Yankees their shortstop, leadoff hitter, and captain. More importantly they lost their rudder - and their soul.

The Yankees bats were barely alive before Derek Jeter went down, and flatlined after. Hiroki Kuroda pitched his ass off the next day, but he was playing alongside The Walking Dead, in a sneak preview of the season premiere later Sunday evening.

Joe Girardi didn't have any answers. All the magic moves he made all season suddenly collapsed. And where was the on-field leadership going to come from?

Robinson Cano? Too nonchalant.

Mark Teixeira? Too humble.

Ichiro Suzuki? Claims he doesn't speak English. And if he did...

Alex Rodriguez? Marginalized.

People talking without speaking. People hearing without listening... And no one dared disturb the sounds of silence.

Because they all took their silent cues from one man.

If Jeter had been lost like Mariano Rivera, in May, the team could have (and ultimately would have) found their way. Leaders would have been born after the shock wore off. But on October 14th the Yankees went into shock, and by October 18th they weren't yet out of it. Which of course meant they were out of it.

Do you think, do you really think the Alex Rodriguez circus would have taken off like this if Jeter was physically there to counsel Girardi in Detroit? No way.

And let's give some credit to the Tigers as well. There wasn't just a team that got swept away, there was an excellent team that did the sweeping.