Trip to Scarborough Faire - 2004

Headed out around 2pm to the fine airport. Got out there in pretty good time, but the parking lot I usually park in was full (Pikes peak shuttle lot), so I had to go on to the Mt Elbert shuttle lot. It's a good deal further away, probibly 2-3miles at least. Also, its pre-pay only. Luckily I had enough cash to pre-pay. Hopped the shuttle bus and got to the terminal reasonably Quickly. I was flying american this time, so they had only self service checkin. It worked pretty well, but the interface was kinda dumb. You had to hit 'proceed' sometimes on screens where it wasn't clear thats what it was waiting for. Checked in and checked my bag (all 45lbs of it) and checked email out at the terminal (CDMA is sometimes very nice). The plane was there on time and we boarded on time too. Used the time in the air to catch up on some newsgroups I don't often have time to follow everyday. We ended up getting into DFW about 25min early, which was great, but there was still a plane at the gate we were arriving at, so we got to sit there and do nothing for about 25min until the other plane was gone. V and C's plane was delayed for 2 hours or so, so I got a ride from A back to her place where there was good friends and BBQ waiting. V & C arrived about 2-3 hours late and we even saved them some ribs. After drinking and visiting until about midnight we decided to head out to our hotel. It was a lot further away than we were thinking it was. Ended up taking us about 2.5 hours to get there. We checked in and collapsed.

After sleeping in nicely we decided to try and setup my access point on the free "high speed" internet in the room. It was a small box on the wall with a ethernet cable coming out of it. Tried plugging it in and doing DHCP, but wasn't getting an address. It was showing 10MB half duplex link, but no traffic at all. V tried his windows laptop and also didn't have any luck. Looking at the box we saw that it was a funky network over AC thing. After rebooting it and fiddling some more we gave up and called the desk to see if there was some problem with it. The front desk guy came right up and gave us a useless sheet of how to use dhcp and connect ethernet cables. Then he had us move one of the cables from a port marked "data" to an unmarked one. Then it started working. Got the access point setup and working and surfing along.

Around noon we headed out to go to B's ranch in cisco. We stopped at a samsclub for V to buy the latest buffy boxed set and some insect repellent. Then we stopped for lunch at a sonic. It wasn't too bad for fast food. By the time we got out to cisco it was around 4pm. Luckily everyone was still out there and we had a nice time shooting clays and plinking with 22's, 9mm's, and E's AR-15. By around 7pm we were done with that and heading back to Ft worth. Ended up stopping for dinner at a random non chain BBQ joint. It was ok, but not amazing. Got back to the hotel around 10pm or so, just in time for some drinking and playing video games. We had spy hunter, godzilla, soul caliber. One of the TV's was a POS and had no ability to change video inputs. We ended up disconnecting the cable and making it rescan and then it saw the A/V input.

Got up reasonably late around 9:15 or so and got ready to head down to the ren faire. Had some continential breakfast and hit the road around 10am or so. Checking the weather there was a nasty storm near waco, with 1" hail. Luckily it was only raining in waxahachie. By the time we got to the front gate and met up with others the rain had stopped and the sun came out. Unfortunately this meant that it was about 90 degrees and 90% humidity the rest of the day. We usually hit the faire on saturday's, and quickly we found out why. No booze for sale until after noon on sundays. Everyone split into various groups and wandered off in seperate directions. Had a nice time wandering around the faire and hanging out. Iris and Rose were amusing, talked to a guy at the starfire booth that was going to be in colorado in a few weeks for the faire here and knew a lot of people I knew. Don Juan and Migel were quite funny on they 6pm show. After the faire we hit the hotel (only 20min away) to clean up and ended up getting dinner at chilis as it was handy.

Slept in some and kicked around the room for a while in the morning. Then we had to hit the railhead BBQ for V and C before they left town. Took a while to get there, but when we finally did it was pretty good. They took about 5lbs of ribs and some susage as a take away to take back to NY with them. Got to the airport only about an hour ahead of my flight, but I didn't have any problems making it. Everything went very smoothly except the baggage claim in DIA was super super slow. They basically took an hour to get the bags for our flight out to the carosel. Made it home around 7pm and greeted my happy dogs.