Return flight not so bad

On the way home from Portland Oregon AWA messed up my connection in Vegas. When I last posted, I was stuck there for 6 hours with nothing to do.

Well, it turns out that one of the people also in that situation was someone I used to work with 10 years ago (Steve McNeary). After talking for a few minutes I said, “Look, I know it sounds crazy, but I was going to take a taxi to see The Star Trek Experience. Would you like to split the taxi cost?”

He had sort of a “that’s stupid and crazy!”-look on his face. But then his eyes widened and he said, “Why the hell not!”

So we caught up with each other (we had 10 years to talk about) while we found the taxi area and got to the LV Hilton, which is where The Star Trek Experience is.

It turned out that there was a Trek convention in town and The Experience was booked for a private party until 11am. Dang.

So we took a taxi to the new part of the strip. The pirate show at Treasure Island was closed due to high winds, then we walked through the fake Venice canal walk at the Venetian. At the Bellagio we stood through 3 water fountain displays (they have this awesome water fountain system that “dances” to music. Every 15 minutes there is a “show” to a different sound that lasts about 4 minutes. It’s like watching ballet.)

We got back to the airport around 9pm, on the plane soon after, and I slept until 6am when we landed. Sadly, due to timezone changes I really only got about 4 hours of sleep.

My Fathers Ashes

Saturday morning my plane landed and Ying picked me up at the airport. We left from there to drive to Connecticut where my family was meeting to put my father’s ashes in their final place. (If you recall, my father passed away last year after a long fight with cancer.)

Ying and I were the last to arrive (Mom, Mary [plus 2 daughters], Rosanne [plus husband and 1 daughter], Edward, Fran, and me [plus Ying]).

We all went to Hammonasset Beach State Park to swim. The kids really like it there. When we got back we ate lunch while the adults discussed a number of options for what to do with the ashes and it was pretty easy to get agreement. My mother had bought tickets to see a musical, so we went to that. At night we went to my father’s favorite restaurant, Lenny and Joe’s Fish Tale. When we got home we all went to sleep pretty quickly.

Sunday morning we woke up early for the ceremony. It went without a hitch. We had flowers for the nieces to spread around the area.

We’ll have to go back in a few months to place the headstone on his plot, which hasn’t been ordered yet. (we weren’t sure if we were going to use the plot he had bought... it’s a long story.)

Then Ying and I drove back to NJ. A long weekend indeed.

Personally I had completed my grieving process about my father months ago but it was good to get one step closer to completion.