Tag: travel

I now possess a jar of legal moonshine

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Over the weekend, some friends and I made a day-trip up to Gastonia, North Carolina, which is about thirty minutes south-ish from Charlotte.  It’s sort of an annual trip that we make so we can go to Mary Jo’s Cloth Store, typically to get fabrics and materials needed for Dragon*Con costumes.  Despite the fact that I don’t really need any substantial fabrics for what I plan on doing this year, I still committed to being driver.  Regardless, while on the way up I-85, a particular billboard had caught my eye.

LEGAL MOONSHINE AVAILABLE EXIT 19B

Moonshine?  As in the nuclear race fuel that farmers and rednecks made on their fuel that was usual like 200 proof and could get a human being drunk as easily as it could strip the paint off of an automobile?  And it was being sold legally?  Oh man, this I had to check out, and since I had the almighty power of being driver, everyone else was at my mercy to indulge in this crazy notion that I needed to acquire said legal moonshine for myself.

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This really only makes sense in Samoa

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The story: Samoa Air plans to institute a pricing model based on the weight of the passengers plus their luggage.

Has anyone ever missed a flight due to weight restrictions? I have. Long story short, I was trying to get on a flight to Mississippi, and according to all information, there were several open seats available. Much to my horror, the door closed right in front of me, and very confused, I asked why no more passengers were being allowed onto the aircraft? Because the aircraft had reached its weight capacity.

Mind you, there were five seats available at this point, which means that the flight reached its weight limit well before reaching its occupancy limit. The passengers already aboard had successfully compensated for the weight of five entire human beings.

Needless to say, I was incensed. I couldn’t imagine what it was like for those who had actually paid a full fare to get on that flight and were denied.

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Photos: An afternoon in Miami, Florida

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s been a while since I made a day trip like this, but despite the fact that I really actually don’t like Miami all that much, the allure of watching World Baseball Classic baseball inside of a ballpark that I had never been to before made it all worth taking a very short trip down to South Florida for an afternoon.

I mean literally, I was off the airplane at 9:30 a.m., took a cab into Little Havana, walked around for a few hours and had some amazing Nicaraguan food, before heading into the park.  New Marlins Park is actually pretty nice for something that’s in Miami, and I guess all those disgruntled taxpayer dollars at least made something pretty nice and a great place to watch baseball.  But due to the risk of getting stuck in Miami overnight, I opted to bail from the game in the 7th inning, and with a little bit of luck, I was back on a flight to Atlanta by 4:30 p.m.  Not too shabby of a way to spend a day, and not a bad way to make Miami a little bit more tolerable – by hardly staying.

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Real Men Don’t Wear Small update: Marlins Park

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The first new baseball park update for the 2013 is a little early this year, but that’s because it’s a World Baseball Classic year!  Despite the fact that I’m not really that big of a fan of the city of Miami, it turns out that one half of the second round of the tournament would be taking place in Miami, namely the new-ish Marlins Park, the successor to the old Sun Life Robbie Land Shark Player park the Dolphins play in.  So if there was ever an excuse to go to Miami to kill two birds with one stone, this really was it.

I’ve been in a funk lately

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

And I’ve got a pretty short fuse, and just about everything in the world is agitating me lately.

I could go into further detail, but the effort required to formulate my thoughts into words to describe how much work is sucking lately, and how much it sucks to think about what it’s going to be like the next time go up to Virginia to visit family just seems so exasperating.

It’s also one of those periods of time when I feel kind of isolated from the world, and that there’s really nobody around that I feel comfortable speaking with who’s remotely available to speak with when I need it.

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It must suck to be New Jersey

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It’s that time of the year when a big inanimate sign with the Wrestlemania logo on it ends up being a bigger star on WWE programming than guys like Kofi Kingston, Santino Marella and the Great Khali.  From January until the start of April, the John Cenas, CM Punks, Big Shows and Dolph Zigglers will stare dreamily at, or point at the sign which hangs high above the arenas in which these shows take place in.  But the point of this post is not wrestling at all; it’s about the Wrestlemania logo, or more specifically what is on the Wrestlemania logo.

“NY|NJ”  As in “New York | New Jersey.”  Which will be taking place at MetLife Stadium, which is located approximately in East Rutherford, wait for it, New Jersey.  Not New York.  No part of Wrestlemania will be taking place in the state of New York.  100% of Wrestlemania will be taking place in the state of New Jersey.  Yet the actual Wrestlemania logo goes as far as to integrate the Empire State Building into it as well, further adding to the absurdity that Wrestlemania is going to take place right in the heart of Times Square or something.

The bottom line is that I don’t really understand why New Jersey so often needs or is unnecessarily given the crutch of New York to give it appeal.  The irony is that I don’t even really like New Jersey, but I still feel bad for the state for constantly being in this strange identity limbo that requires New York to be handcuffed to them in order to give them any notoriety.

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Photos: Porkapalooza 2013

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This past weekend, I made a brief trip up to Charlottesville to visit some friends.  On the docket was a trip into rural bumfuck Gordonsville, where they happened to have a pretty decent barbecue joint called The Barbecue Exchange, where they happened to be having their annual Porkapalooza event.  Basically, ten bucks, and as much bbq buffet as one can stomach.

In spite of snow flurries and actual freezing temperatures, it was a good occasion of eating pigs like pigs, as well as enjoying good company.  The quality of the bbq, despite being churned out quickly for buffet purposes, was still pretty good, and I liked their variety of sauces.  Their creative desserts were also almost all very good.

In terms of bang for buck, it really doesn’t get any better than this, so I’d have to say Porkapalooza was one fantastic event, and was a highlight of a pretty pleasant trip.

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