The wedding was held on Saturday, at Glenora Wine Cellars on Seneca Lake in the Finger Lakes region of New York. It was beautiful and awesome, but that's for Part III. It was about an hour away from where we and a boat load of guests went to school, Ithaca College, so it was a family reunion of sorts. Taking advantage of the location, I arranged for some friends and I to head up a day early and spend some time revisiting our old stomping grounds on Thursday.
You Have To Pay To Check Your Luggage, But Your Personal Baggage Is Free!
"When we arrive in the middle of nowhere, don't act like you know.
I been here so many times, I never seen you before.
But now that I have, I don't wanna see you no more."
- Queens of the Stone Age - Auto Pilot
On Wednesday night I wondered why in the world did I book a 9:30 am flight. For most people 9:30 is a reasonable time. Not me, I work until 1am, so I usually wake up around 9:30. So you can see why I was not looking forward to my flight. But it was worth it, and I knew it would be. The whole reason I flew in early was so I could have the whole day to do what I wanted. That sounds really selfish, but there were things I wanted to do by myself, at my own pace, so I got there well before anyone else. I've always enjoyed flying, there's something relaxing about it to me. Thanks to Lost, when we hit turbulence, I wondered "am I in a parallel dimension?" At least a memory isn't triggered every time I heard a jet engine. Every time I fly, I keep hoping my pilot will be Frank Lapdius. I also love people watching at the airport. Yeah that's right, if we're waiting at the gate for the same flight, chances are I'm observing you for a minute or two. I just assume you're doing the same. What I don't love is the ever increasing fee to check my bag. 20% of my flying expenses was my luggage. I had to check a bag, as I had a laptop bag, a suit bag and a suitcase. Despite the name there was simply no way I was going to put my suit in a case that is not designed to hold it. And of course it takes for freaking ever to actually get your bag checked at Hartsfield-Jackson (Part III preview: it takes even longer to get it back). And I flew Delta, who go pretty fast compared to the other big Atlanta carrier, Air Tran. I've been done with Air Tran for a while though due to their customer service. It felt like I was in a line of four people for half an hour. Then I get to the security gate and of course in front of me is a family where the parents don't speak English and their paperwork isn't up to snuff, so everyone gets held up. How about next time you don't get in the Expert Traveler lane, since clearly you're not? It's always something. I made it to the gate just as they started boarding. We landed in Rochester a little after 11--amazingly my flight got there 25 minutes early--and headed down to Ithaca. I got a standard rental car, but as I waited to get mine I kind of wished I upgraded to a Chrysler 300 for the style alone. Oh well, next time. Since I drive a truck, a run of the mill sedan feels sporty to me, so there were no complaints about the driving. I got to Ithaca around about 2, giving me plenty of time to see what I wanted to see. It's funny, as I drove into town I immediately remembered where everything was, and so did others who visited on Thursday and/or Sunday. When I go home to visit my family and I drive someplace, sometimes I need to take a moment to remember how to get there, and that's where I grew up. Strangely that wasn't the case with Ithaca. Probably because it's so small and downtown is a grid. A lot's changed in Ithaca and at Ithaca College, but yet it's still the same beautiful college town (it's also home to Cornell) and small college campus. I got lunch at Wegman's of course, the buffalo chicken pizza is exactly as I remembered it: really, really good. I was a little amazed that in the middle of the afternoon in a college town with no college students that the parking lot was packed.
A Small College Goes A Little Big Time
With plenty of time on my hands, I visited my alum, Ithaca College. It looks different. There's some new buildings built and another one on the way. And I haven't donated a cent, so they don't really need my money. My full tuition was donation enough, thanks Dad.
The new administrative building. How nice that the former dean named it after herself.
The business school building. Not really sure why they deserved it.
As I write the first draft of this in my hotel room while waiting for the rest of my group to arrive, Pulp Fiction is on. It's at the scene where Vincent and Jules are at the diner that they get robbed at, and just now the part where Jules decides to retire is on. He tells Vincent that he had "what alcoholics call 'a moment of clarity.' " I realized I haven't yet had mine (no, I'm not an alcoholic).
The Fish Bowl is an IC landmark. Because no one knows what the hell it is.
Getting back to it, I went into good old Roy H. Park School of Communications, my second home in college. A lot of memories here. I ran into an old professor, he was teaching a small class in Studio B and I didn't want to intrude, but he noticed me out in the hall. It took him a moment to recognize me, my appearance has changed since I was in school. He gave his small summer class a breather and gave me a quick tour of what's new in the facility. I really appreciated it. There's a lot of new equipment and they re-did the studios. The studio control rooms are more like professional control rooms, and there's more fun toys for people to learn. There's more great upgrades on the way, they want to go to HD in a couple of years. Hmm, maybe I should donate to help get things going quicker. I also ran into a couple of the studio techs, and it also took them a moment to recognize my old face. I don't blame them. Speaking of old faces, I saw a janitor there that I recognized from my time at IC. The reason I recognized him? He has an awesome Amish-style beard. While we were catching up, a student was having a problem getting a 3/4" tape deck to work (yeah, someone in the world still uses them), so they would up pulling the deck out, cleaning the heads and since it was missing a cover top they put some cardboard on top of it. Some things never change.
Looking back, I should have just had this as my address for mail. I would have gotten things sooner.
Memories Overflow
"Come and walk down memory lane, no one sees a thing, but they can pretend."
- Manic Street Preachers - Mausoleum
I walked around campus and took some photos for old time's sake. It was a bit emotional. But this is why I wanted to get there early--I wanted some time to myself to explore both physically and mentally. I don't know the next time I'll be back in Ithaca, if I ever am, so I wanted to soak it all in for what might be the last time. This wouldn't be the last time I would have this feeling over the weekend. I visited old dorms, scenes of vivid memories and some not so vivid. Checking out my sophomore year dorm, I remembered the time my roommate The Doctor and I gave serious thought to moving our neighbor's room to the lawn outside. Parking in the small lot right outside the dorm reminded me of the time someone from the second floor ran down and jumped in the still running but unattended car of a pizza deliverer and drove it around the island in the parking lot a few times without the delivery guy noticing. Or the time The Doctor took one of our freshman floormates to a frat party. He told us he drank all the time, he lied, but we didn't know at the time and so The Doctor got him pretty drunk and in the morning I woke up to the taste of Lysol from the epic cleaning effort that went on down the hall in his dorm room. I can still see The Doctor sitting in a chair mopping the only real cleaning product anyone had into a large circular stain on the floor next to the bed. The cleaning product was laundry detergent. By the way, if you're going on a nostalgic trip, don't read Emmanuel Kant on the plane trip there, it'll mess with your mind a bit.
Getting The Band Back Together
I checked into the hotel suite I booked for myself and 5 friends whom I will refer to as Goldie Locks, Sh*thead and Mrs. Sh*thead (they're engaged), and Homebrew and Kayak (they're married). When I booked the hotel room a while back, it told me it was the penthouse suite, which was pretty cool because Ithaca doesn't have a lot of tall buildings and is pretty scenic. It lied. The room was on the 2nd floor, but really it doesn't matter. We were only in town for one night, had it been a two or three night thing I would have cared more. (Back in Atlanta, one of my roommates said "maybe they meant they had some Penthouses in the suite." Good point.) Besides, there's way more important things than what floor we're on. Like if it had properly functioning fire alarms. More on that in Part II.
Our first stop was Chapter House at Collegetown up at Cornell. It was exactly how it was when we were there: awesome beer selection, a popcorn machine in the back behind the foosball and pool tables, and furniture old enough to make you think Ezra Cornell himself sat in a chair there, certainly at least Ken Dryden. We had a few pints of local-ish brews, Saranac beers aren't made real close to Ithaca, but they're a local favorite. The bartender turned on Terminator 2, to the delight of every guy in the bar, all 5 of us. It was fairly dead but then again it was like 7 o'clock and all the college students were gone. The advantage to that was we were able to park on the street and not up the hill at the parking lot where some of us wrote our names in the snow during a guys night out in the dead of winter. We didn't use our hands to write. So anyway, naturally our discussion turned towards Terminator, which is never a bad thing.
Chapter House, where you can get drunk and argue about nuclear physics.
Next stop was Joe's Restaurant downtown. It's a good place to take your parents when they came to town. I think its on it's third owner in 7 years. There was a time when it was closed, apparently for failure to pay taxes. It's been redone a bit in the meantime, and the menu's changed but the food was really good. I had ravioli carbonara and no longer felt the need to eat for three more days. Because carbonara sauce isn't filling enough, they put it on raviolis to ensure it causes heart failure when you're 63. My kind of place. Luckily no one got any plastic wrap in their food like the time I went with my parents and The Doctor. He had his lasagna about 3/4s finished and then bit into a piece of plastic wrap. He got his for free and they gave him another one, despite being nearly done with the first one. The Doctor isn't fat but he's a big guy and he ate the other one too, to the surprise of no one. I didn't see the stuffed breast on the menu, but that's a "you had to be there" story. For those who were there, it was pretty funny.
Then we joined up with Home Brew, Kayak and My Brother From Another Mother (we were literally born on the same day) and headed to our favorite bar, Moonshadow's, on The Commons.
I stole this photo from a friend. Because it's good.
We were extremely disappointed. Moonshadow's was this great little bar that was dimly lit, had like 4 beers on tap, no food (sometimes they'd bring out a bad pizza or mediocre sandwiches during happy hour, but there wasn't a menu to order from), maybe 5 TVs and dimly lit bathrooms that you didn't want to go in anyway, but you loved it because they had a great system where when you bought a beer you got a red plastic chip that you could redeem for a beer, thereby making every beer purchased a 2 for 1 special. If you got a well drink they gave you a white chip. On Wednesday nights they gave you two chips per drink, and if you got a pitcher they gave you a big blue chip that was worth a pitcher. Yeah, you can see why we loved it. We would go Wednesday night and fill up on chips for the weekend. Also since it's on The Commons you can stumble over to Sammy's and get some pizza afterward. Now Moonshadow's has a nightclub atmosphere and they stopped the chip system. Also the bathrooms are annoyingly bright and unnecessarily huge. What makes it so disheartening is that it is owned by IC alums. You would think they would keep the tradition going, but no. They must have been theatre majors. Still, we stayed and drank and played some really bad darts. I hit double bulls-eye on my third throw, and it was predictably all downhill from there. Fellow Flyers fan Home Brew and I teamed up as "Let's Go Flyers" and Sh*thead and MBFAM named themselves after the groom's manhood: "2 1/4 inches." It was one of the rare times his manhood would win something. There will be many insults of the groom all weekend. It's what we do. We love him.
Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills.
It was a quiet night of drinking, but it was nice to be back in town. And the next two nights were going to be big nights so taking it easy was fine. There would be plenty of drunkenness over the weekend. We finished up and made our way to our hotel room around the corner. I love it when a plan comes together. I booked our hotel so close on purpose--I wanted us to start up hill at Collegetown, drive down to where ever we wound up getting dinner and then walk back to our hotel. No drunk driving, no needlessly spending money on a cab, and we got to walk around a bit extra. We found a welding sculpture of a horse, and I had to stop and get my photo taken with it, because there's a song my college friends sing when we get drunk together about me being a horse's ass, so they eat it up when I pose for a photo with one:
It's impossible to make an ass out of yourself when you already are one.
And that was it for Thursday. We headed to bed, and with Kayak and I needing to get up early to go golfing in the morning, we were looking forward to a good's night sleep. Check in for Part 2 to see if we got it. Yeah that's the worst tease ever.
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