Bryce Moore's Blog, page 31

Bryce’s Handy Guide to Vacation Weight Loss

Has this every happened to you? You’ve just come back from an extended summer vacation, where you personally challenged yourself to drink every single milkshake you came across? And you had the fortitude to hold yourself to that vow, even going so far as to seek out more milkshakes, just to make things more challenging? And have you ever come back from that vacation weighing a full ten pounds more than when you set out on it?

If so, then I imagine you might have wondered, “How am I ever going to lose all this extra weight?!”

Fear not, faithful reader. Because I have discovered the key. The one easy step to making all your weight loss dreams come true. We’re talking shedding off pounds at the rate of one per day. Better yet, it requires no exercise, and no additional work from you. No, it’s not a tape worm. What kind of lame friend would I be if I just blithely recommended you went out and got a parasite? No, this is much more reliable, and without all the wriggling.

The stomach flu.

That’s right, friends. With a simple case of the stomach flu, you too can be throwing up that weight as easy as falling off a log. Better yet, you won’t have any appetite at all! You just lie around all day and maybe risk eating a Saltine now and then, only to remember that no, you don’t want to eat, and you felt better before that Saltine.

But wait, there’s more! As long as you’ve got sick time, you can laze around in bed, watching your to-do pile grow as you question your will to keep pushing forward. Wondering if your coworkers have started to think you just went on a second vacation and are “calling in sick.”

Don’t think you’re going to be doing this all on your own, folks. No, a really good stomach bug brings the whole family together. Nothing says “I love you” like watching your daughter throw up 27 times in one day. Just ask Denisa! And if you’ve got another daughter who traipses off to a summer camp, there’s not a chance in the world she’ll forget you. No. The stomach bug won’t let her!

Of course, timing everything right so it works like this takes a special finesse I can’t teach you. That’s something you’re going to have to work out for yourself. After all, I’m about out of energy typing this.

Maybe I’ll go find another Saltine . . .

2023 Vacation Report: Route 66

There’s a sort of mystique around Route 66. I’m not quite sure where it comes from. There are songs about it, of course, and it feels like Pixar practically made a whole movie about it. Maybe it’s the fact that road trip films are a thing, and when you’re talking about cross country road trips, Route 66 epitomized a lot of what they had to offer. So after you watch everything from National Lampoon’s Vacation to Rat Race, you start to feel like you’d really like to see what Route 66 is like in person.

At least, that’s what you tell your family when you explain why they’re going to have to extend the road trip by three or four days, just because you don’t want to backtrack through Oklahoma. (And seriously, once you get past the eastern bit of it, you don’t want to backtrack through Oklahoma.)

Setting all that aside, I’ve now been on more than a bit of Route 66, and I’ve got some thoughts.

First off, I totally get why Route 66 has such a mythos around it. When I think back on our road trip, there are a ton of good memories. Crazy things we saw. Funny stories about getting lost or having arguments in the car or seeing tourist traps. For the space of time of that road trip, it’s almost like we were on a four person ship, traveling across the country, cut off from pretty much everyone else. The road had a flow to it. We had to keep going forward. There was no stopping. No turning around. It naturally lends itself to stories. There’s a defined beginning and an end.

Did Route 66 itself enhance that? Well, no. Not really. Much of the road is through country that just isn’t that interesting to look at. So yes, there are tourist traps, but they’re few and far between, and it’s all exacerbated by the fact that instead of driving 45mph on Route 66, you can drive 80mph on an interstate right next to it.

“But Bryce!” you say. “You’ve got to slow down. Savor the journey.”

Yeah. I’m assuming you haven’t been following along. I was on the road for twelve days. I savored that journey until it was nothing more than a tasteless husk of a memory. Also, Cars wasn’t joking. Most of those places and small towns that were on Route 66 . . . didn’t make it. So yes, there are things to be seen, but they’re often few and far between.

We checked out Cadillac Ranch, which defied all expectations. (Mainly because there wasn’t much of a “ranch” to it at all, as Denisa pointed out.) It’s a set of cars buried front end first into the desert, and they’ve all been spray painted heavily. I didn’t realize that the spray painting was an ongoing thing, however. They sell spray paint as you’re walking up to cars, and everyone’s out there using so much aerosol I was surprised there wasn’t a gaping hole in the Ozone Layer right above us. There was no way I was going to pay a ton for spray paint, so we kept walking. Then, another group coming the other way asked us if we’d like to use their spray paint. So we got a can for free (and in turn passed it on to another group). You don’t need a ton of spray paint, and even if you didn’t get lucky in finding someone wanting to gift you a can, there are a lot of cans people just left on the ground, half empty. All told it was . . . better than not stopping at all.

We stopped by a classic car museum, because once again, we’d been driving for a long time, and it was good to get out and stretch. $20 got us a half hour of entertainment, which isn’t the worst, but it kind of sums up a lot of what I saw on the road. Places to see that aren’t really destinations at all, but if you’ve got to blow some time and make sure no one in the car kills anyone, you could do worse.

I also stopped at the corner of Winslow Arizona, though I just stayed long enough to snap a selfie.

All told, I could theoretically see taking more than a couple of days and spending them on Route 66, but I don’t think I ever will. It was fascinating to watch the country turn more and more to desert the farther we went, but almost none of the places we passed really seemed like things I’ll regret missing. Would I recommend the trip from Oklahoma to the Grand Canyon? Sure! It’s a part of the country I hadn’t seen before. But was it different than other road trips?

Not really. Each road trip is unique to itself, even if you’re traveling the same road twice, with the same people.

Tomas Update: Week 8 in Trenčín

Ahojte všetci! I am finally back. Things have been kinda crazy out here lately and I keep dropping the time to write an email so here we are. 

Highlights from the past few weeks:

-randomly meeting the parents of one of my mom’s friends 

-recording a really cool arrangement of “Consider the Lilies” in a legit studio in Bratislava

-eating an entire študentská (big chocolate bar) in under 3min

-taking pictures at a cool joust

-learning how to make palacinky with babka

-slightly breaking my camera lens 

-upgrading my commander decks and subsequently totally shredding last Tuesday

-randomly running into my uncle at a big antiques event

and a whole lot more that I can’t remember right now. 

Anyways, here is this week:

Tuesday we went and grabbed ties at the best place to buy cheap ties in Slovakia (that we know of) so we could take em to zone conference and be the tie dealers. Pretty classic. Also interviews with Prezident and a cool video lesson with our new friend Andrea. And the aforementioned Commander night where I wrecked with my upgraded deck. It’s been fun and the guys are so cool and kind to us! Rest assured I am representing Maine’s players well I think. 

Wednesday we went out to Blava for zone conference, that was pretty cool. It’s always great to see everyone since are so far apart and of course we learned a ton and are trying to apply it in the coming weeks. 

Thursday we went BACK again so we could go record some stuff with the musicians in the zone at a studio we rented, I had to be in the soundproof box because my violin is pretty quiet and I also had to do like 15 takes of the start by myself because I’m not the greatest soloist… But it went well!! I’m excited to hear the results for that. We were so dead by the end of that day though. 

Friday Goodare (my companion now, Osborne is off in Banská Bystrica) was not feelin the best so we took it kinda easy. We ended up going to the hospital which was quite the experience (same one where I had my crown done! Fun fact!) but he’s all good and we are resting and he’s got the medicine he needs so no worries. 

Saturday not a ton happened because of Goodare being sick but it was an okay day. Not a ton to say. 

Sunday we had like 14 people at church! Some visitors from Uherské Hradište and the Valničkovci were finally back. That was good after a few bare weeks at church and I finally didn’t speak on Sunday which was also good. I spoke with no prep the last two Sundays since it’s kinda on me as I am 1st councilor in the branch presidency. Wasn’t expecting that one but here I am. But then again I get to see the exciting financial side of things (spoiler: the church keeps really good track of all of its money). 

Okay and then finishing today, we went and visited the castle Beckov which was cool, and also I remembered it!! I saw some tower and remembered it from whenever I visited (like a long time ago) which was cool. Very nice castle (7.5/10) and would probably go again. Then we came back and shopped and now I am writing this email. 

Things are good here in Trenčín! Next week is transfers and I 100% do not want to leave so hopefully I stay. I live living here and I am loving working here as well. So thankful I can be here as always. 

Okay, photos link (there will be many) 

https://photos.app.goo.gl/GHgGUxN4X6y5nvio8

As usual, hope you are all well and haven’t missed these updates too much. It’s been good to write and I definitely have to do this more. Thanks for reading!

S láskou,

Starší Cundick 

2023 Vacation Report: Researching Murder

I never really set out to be a horror writer. Or a thriller writer. Or an historical serial killer writer, which I suppose is as close to a descriptor of my current books as you can get. When left to my own devices, I think I tend toward a more humorous slant, but that’s not how the publishing world works. The books I’ve been writing that have found the largest audience are much more macabre, and so here I am.

Not that I’m complaining. Writing is writing, I’ve found, and one of the things I also love is researching. Writing books set in history can be very challenging, if you want to get the history right. True, I fictionalize a lot of the actual events of the plot, since with each of my books, I take a serial killer from history and use that as the premise, inserting a new character to see how that might play out. But I still want to get as much of the period right as possible. What was the technology like? How fast could you travel? What did each city look like? How would you arrive there? Where would you stay?

My current work in progress is set in Kansas in 1873. This is by far the earliest time period I’ve researched. Honestly, I don’t plan to write another book set that long ago again. As I’ve been writing, I’ve realized just how much of that time I don’t have a deep knowledge of. From the fashions to the firearms, it’s felt like every time I want to just write a scene, I’ve ground to a halt because I need to first understand so much of the setting of that scene to know what can and can’t happen.

Then again, that also leads to some really interesting research. The history of guns, for example. How ammunition developed, and how accurate the guns actually were. The history of trains: how fast they went, how often they’d need to stop, what routes they traveled. (Did you know, for instance, that much of the speed of the train depended on the quality of the track? In many areas, the tracks were laid down so quickly, the trains couldn’t go very fast at all, for fear of ripping the whole track to pieces.)

This was all further complicated by the simple fact that I’d never actually been to Kansas or Oklahoma, the two states where the book mainly takes place. I had no real knowledge of what it looked like there. Yes, I tried to use Google Maps to get an approximation of it, but it’s really hard to get a feel for an area from Google Maps. It’s too clunky. So I really wanted to visit the spot myself, and I’m very glad I did.

In my head, Kansas and Oklahoma were just these flat wide open spaces with nothing but wheat fields. Yes, this is showing my ignorance, but if you’ve talked to me much at all, you know I’ve got plenty of that to go around. How flat was flat, though? Were there any hills at all? Trees? What kind of plants and birds?

Having driven through the area now, I know how wrong I was. I can’t speak for central or western Kansas, but eastern Kansas was plenty green and hilly, with lots of variation. Eastern Oklahoman was beautiful as well, though the farther west you get, the more it starts to turn toward desert. (Not full on desert, but you can feel the transition happening.) Just having driven across all the area I’m writing about will help me make it that much more accurate and lived in. That makes a big difference.

I also stopped at two local museums to see what they had from that time period. Once again, I was reminded of how much easier (and more effective) simply going to a place can be, compared to trying to cobble what you can together from internet posts and Wikipedia pages. In the space of an hour, I had more information and photographs and news articles about what I was looking for than I’d found through days and days of searches online.

I’m not one to glorify past (or present) violence. One of the museums had the actual murder weapons there on display. That doesn’t give me any sort of thrill at all, honestly. I looked at them, took a picture, and moved on. What I do connect with is the stories of the people who lived through those attacks. Researching the past, I discover how often little has changed between then and now. Yes, there are the technological advances, but people are people. It doesn’t matter if they’ve got social media or they ride horses. They have the same basic hopes, dreams, and fears. That comes to life on the person to person level in a way you miss out on if you try to just keep history separated into neat Eras.

In any case, it was a very effective research expedition. I can’t wait to hopefully share it with you soon.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this DON’T GO TO SLEEP Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

2023 Vacation Report: Petrified Forest National Park

If you’re driving along Route 66 through Arizona, you will go straight through Petrified Forest National Park. Not that you’d see anything of it if you don’t get off the freeway. MC was quite disappointed that there weren’t actually stone trees looming over us on every side when we visited (and that would have been awesome). But you can get off the highway and take a 28 mile drive through the park. Yes, you’re taking a break from driving by driving somewhere else, instead, but I put it to a vote in the car. (I didn’t want to be the one to inflict another hour of driving when the rest of the gang wanted to be free of the car.) They unanimously wanted to see the park.

Note that it will cost $25 to do the drive, the same fee you’d pay if you were going to stay for a longer time. But also note that for $80, you can get an annual national park pass. If you’re already planning to go to the Grand Canyon, that would cost $35. Bryce Canyon (where we were headed as well) is another $35. Since there are so many stunning national parks in that area, I think it’s worth while to just pay the $80 and see as many as you can. You can buy the annual pass at the entrance to the park. No need to get out and go into the visitor’s center. Just pay at the same place you’d pay for entry.

The nice thing about the visit is that it’s not all just driving. There are many places to pull over, get out of the car, and check things out. The Painted Desert was gorgeous, and it’s close to the start of the route (if you’re traveling west). The end of the route has the best examples of petrified wood. Would I go to the park for an extended visit? Um . . . no. Probably not. It was super hot, quite flat, and didn’t seem like a place I’d like to camp (especially with the Grand Canyon looming in the future). But it was a lovely place to visit.

One other note: there is a ton of petrified wood in the area, not just in the park. The park just has the places with the biggest concentrations of it. You can buy samples of the wood at the gift store, but don’t fall for that. Just outside the park (and practically everywhere else you go), there are places where people are hawking petrified wood left and right, for much less money.

In short, this park is a great side stop on a larger journey, even if I personally would make it an end destination.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this DON’T GO TO SLEEP Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Visiting Nauvoo with a Family

This post will be more aimed at Latter-day Saints than most of mine, unless there are some of you who are planning to travel across the country by car and are looking for an interesting, free place to stop along the way. In that case, I’d definitely point you in this direction, as it’s very well-run and was my kids’ favorite part of the whole trip. (Sorry, Grand Canyon.) Why? Read on.

First, a bit of background. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints bounced around a lot in its early years, mainly because anywhere they started to establish themselves, the locals eventually ended up threatening to kill them unless they left. (And they usually killed a few members, just to show they were serious.) The last place the Latter-day Saints settled before they moved to Utah was Illinois, in a city they founded themselves on swampland no one else wanted. They called it Nauvoo. They’d only end up staying there for seven years: Joseph Smith was killed by angry locals. (In the seven years they’d lived there, the city had grown to 12,000 people. From what I’ve read, that was bigger than Chicago at the time. Citizens were worried the religious group would take over.)

In the years since, the Church has bought back the land, built a temple there, and restored the buildings to make the area a living history site. It’s staffed completely by volunteer missionaries now, and you can go for free to see anything they have to offer. They keep the focus on history, though they do talk about the faith of the people who lived there. What they believed and why they moved there. Because of its historical nature, this didn’t come across as preachy to me, but then again, I’m a member, so perhaps my tolerance for preachy is higher than someone else’s. I know I’ve gone to historical Shaker villages that talk about the Shaker religion and haven’t left feeling like I was being pressed to become a Shaker. This felt about on par with that.

What sort of activities are there? Well, there’s a working blacksmith, a printing shop, gun store, bakery, cultural hall, and more. In each of the places you go, there are people there to explain how things were done back in the 1840s. There are a slew of historical homes as well, all furnished with period-appropriate pieces. There are carriage rides and wagon rides that give you a tour of the town and area. In one spot, they show you how to make bricks, weave, make rope, and more. (The kids made their own rope and got to take it with them.)

But all of those things were there the last time I went. New to me this time were the performing missionaries. These are college-aged missionaries who audition to come to Nauvoo for 3.5 months and spend their time giving concerts, acting, and putting on shows. We got to Nauvoo in the evening (after the tires on our car were fixed) and went to a show they put on every evening (again, for free). It started with about 45 minutes of a brass band (really a full band, since they had a slew of woodwinds, too), followed by a 45 minute musical theater show. When the missionaries came out, they seemed just bursting with exuberance, to the point that I thought I was going to be hokey’ed out within minutes. Instead, their excitement was contagious, and I ended up thoroughly enjoying myself.

The musicians and singers are super talented, and I don’t say that lightly. They had a fiddle player who could knock your socks off. Daniela and MC talked to some of them afterward, and they both are really hoping they can go to Nauvoo one day in that role. Yes, it was all about as over-the-top wholesome as you can imagine, and I’m sure you could look at it all with a cynical eye. But talking with them and hearing about what they’re doing and what they think, I couldn’t help but wish more people could embrace that wholesomeness without worrying about what other people might think. It seemed genuine to me.

Later on that night, there was a presentation they call the “Trail of Hope,” where you walk down the road the Saints used to leave the city and head west, and the performing missionaries are there at stations along the way, acting out the part of some of the people who left. They quote from their journals or sing songs from the time. It was quite moving.

That said, it connected with me because these were also my ancestors. I had family on both my mother and father’s sides that were there in Nauvoo, dealing with the angry mobs. Abandoning their homes. I talked with the girls about it as well, showing them that they could do hard things, because their great-great-great-great grandparents did hard things. That didn’t matter as much to me when I was younger, but the older I get, the more I feel connected to those who came before me.

In any case, we had a fantastic time, and we would happily go again.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this DON’T GO TO SLEEP Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

How to Break Up a Cross Country Trip into Manageable Chunks

My road trip this summer was a doozy, as I’ve already said. 5,037 miles driven, total. Yeah, that’s a lot of miles, but to put that a bit more into perspective, to drive from Fort Kent in absolute northern Maine to San Diego in southwestern California, you’d go 3,257 miles. So we could have almost gone across the country and halfway back, the long way. (And mind you, we flew home.) When I first approached the family with the idea, it was not met with glowing reactions. Daniela and MC were particularly less than enthused. As if sitting in the back seat of a car for thousands of miles could somehow be less than pleasurable. Go figure.

In any case, I knew going into the trip that I’d want to be careful to keep things interesting, light, and fun. This was my third cross country roadtrip, thankfully, so I had some experience to draw on. The last time I did it with a family, we just kind of winged it. We had AAA guidebooks for the states we were going through, and we drove until we felt like stopping, then found a hotel around that area, and went like that across the country. For the most part, it worked, but there were a few hotels that turned out to be pretty sketchy, particularly for a family with young kids. I wanted to avoid doing that again. Plus, this time we had great things like Google Maps and a fully functional cell phone for the whole way. That made a big difference as well. (GPS technology has come a long way in a decade.)

But how do you go about planning an entire trip in one fell swoop? Because that’s what it felt like I had to do. For a while, I kept postponing doing anything, just because it felt so overwhelming. In the end, I focused on a few guiding principles:

We’d stay in the same sort of hotel every night, when possible. When you’re in a different place every night, having some consistency can really help. Since I’ve got Diamond membership with Hilton, I chose Hampton Inns as the hotel of choice. They’ve got a nice free breakfast, almost always have pools, and are generally just solid hotels.We’d drive no more than 6 hours a day, if possible. While that seems like a lot of driving on the surface, it’s really just drive for a while, stop for lunch or an activity. Drive some more, stop again. It’s very doable.

With those in mind, suddenly things didn’t seem as bad. I had some places where I knew we wanted to stop:

Palmyra (church history)Niagara FallsKirtland (church history)Nauvoo/Carthage (church history)St. Louis (to see friends)Independence (church history)Kansas & Oklahoma (book research)Salt Lake City (ultimate destination)

Taking those into account, I saw that we wouldn’t be able to easily drive from Oklahoma straight across to Utah again. It seemed like it would be more interesting to follow Route 66 through to Arizona, then hit the Grand Canyon as we headed north. That gave me the overall general path we’d be taking.

From there, I looked at how long the whole drive would take if we did it in one fell swoop: around 70 hours. If we did 6 hours max per day, it would take about 12 days to make the trip at that pace. That seemed like a lot, but I stuck to the goal for the most part. I really wanted this to be a fun, memorable experience. Jamming people into a car against their will for long periods of time would be anything but.

Then it turned into simple logistics. Where were we starting, and how far could we make it in 6 hours of driving? Google Maps helped a ton with this. I took it each day at a time, trying to break it all into manageable chunks. By doing this, I realized some things would have to give a little. I knew there was lots to do in Nauvoo, and that we’d want a bit of a break in the middle somewhere so I gave us two nights there. To compensate for that, I extended some of the drives on other legs by an hour or two. To compensate for that, I shortened some of the other drives to make things less daunting.

Overall, we stuck to 12 days. Here’s how it broke down, more or less:

Day One: Home to Utica, New York, stopping by Ben & Jerry’s Factory for a break. 388 miles, 8 hours of driving. (It was the first day. We were all fresh. I figured I could push it a bit there.)Day Two: Utica to Madison, Ohio, stopping at Palmyra and Niagara Falls. 397 miles, 6 hours of driving. We got tripped up a bit because the visitor’s center in Palmyra didn’t open until 1 (it was on a Sunday), meaning we had to spin our wheels for a while. Thankfully, Hill Cumorah and the Sacred Grove were both open to walk through whenever you wanted, so we did that first. Niagara took longer than I expected as well, so we didn’t get into Madison until late.Day Three: Madison to Joliet, Illinois, stopping at Kirtland, the Christmas Story House (it’s 20 minutes from Kirtland, people!) and Amish country in Indiana. 418 miles, 6.5 hours of driving.Day Four: Joliet to Nauvoo, Illinois, no stops. 276 miles, 4 hours of driving. This was the day our tires decided to almost blow out. Thankfully, we had time to get them replaced. Yay for building that extra time into the schedule.Day Five: Nauvoo. No driving.Day Six: Nauvoo to St. Louis. 164 miles, 3 hours of driving.Day Seven: St. Louis to Gardner Kansas, stopping at Far West, Adam-ondi-ahman, Liberty, and Independence. 389 miles, 6.5 hours of driving.Day Eight: Gardner to Elk City, Oklahoma, stopping for book research along the way. 479 miles, 7 hours of driving. (This was a rough day for the fam. Who knew researching the area around serial killing sites wouldn’t be as riveting to everyone else?)Day Nine: Elk City to Albuquerque, New Mexico, stopping at Cadillac Ranch. 440 miles, 6.5 hours of driving.Day Ten: Albuquerque to the Grand Canyon, stopping at Petrified Forest National Park. 420 miles, 6 hours of driving. (However, there was a huge traffic jam in Flagstaff. I didn’t take traffic into account when I did my planning. Thankfully, Google Maps found an alternate route through the mountains.)Day Eleven: Grand Canyon to Bryce Canyon. 287 miles, 5.5 hours of driving.Day Twelve: Bryce Canyon to Salt Lake City, stopping for a slot canyon hike at Willis Creek and then in Manti to see the temple where Denisa and I got married. 271 miles, 6 hours of driving. That road to the slot canyon was short, but suuuuper rough.

Like I said, the roughest day was Oklahoma, but all told, the trip went swimmingly. I love it when a good plan comes together. It helped that we didn’t really dictate at all what the girls did in the back seat. Play on the Switch? Watch movies? Whatever they wanted. There was no “you have to look at where we’re going to appreciate it all” rule. If it wasn’t interesting enough to catch their attention, I wasn’t going to force it on them. And guess what? Most of the places were interesting enough to catch their attention.

We didn’t listen to any audio books. We talked a lot. Listened to some music. The girls made friendship bracelets. Honestly, the driving was some of the easiest parts of the trip. We settled into a routine, and things went really nicely. The Hampton Inns were perfect (though we stayed at the Grand Canyon and then at a Best Western at Bryce, since there was no Hampton), and I’d definitely go that route again.

It was a ton of planning and research, but I feel like all that effort helped make it go as well as it did. Happy to answer any questions you might have!

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this DON’T GO TO SLEEP Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Website Updating

I figured I’d better take some time to post a quick explanation for why the website is going to be looking different over the next bit. I last update things back in . . . 2013? Around ten years ago, give or take. And when I came back to the blog after my hiatus, I took some time to actually look around the website.

Only to discover (of course) just how woefully out of date it is. How out of date? I don’t even mention Perfect Place to Die or Don’t Go to Sleep anywhere. Nothing about where to buy them. Reviews. Synopses. Nada.

Talk about an author fail.

So I’ve been taking some time to poke around on other author websites, mainly to remind myself what I ought to have on here. I do a good job with the blogging, but the main goal of the blog (way back when) was to establish myself as an author with some sort of a web presence. At some point, the blog eclipsed the site. I’d like to correct that somewhat.

I’m not shooting for the world’s best author site. I just want something adequate. Something that says who I am and what I write, and points people in the direction of my books. I’d like to set up a way for people to buy signed books directly from me, as well.

I’ve already switched the basic look of the site. I debated doing it all at once, but that was just going to be too much for me. Instead, I’m going to work at it over time. I’ll announce when it’s done. In the meantime, you’ll just notice it might look a bit different each time you come over here to read a post. Sorry for the dust.

Hopefully it doesn’t take me too long.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this DON’T GO TO SLEEP Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

2023 Vacation Report: Niagara Falls

The last time we headed to Niagara Falls, ten years ago or so, Denisa and I were decidedly unimpressed. Not with the falls themselves, mind you. They’re stunning. Rather, we weren’t fans of the stuff around the falls. It felt like you had to drive through a whole lot of tourist-trappy places before you got there. There was a real disconnect between the natural beauty of the falls, and the commercialization of them that we didn’t care for, so much so that I even debated going back.

Still, when you’re headed west, there are only so many places to see along certain routes. We’d gone to Palmyra to see the Hill Cumorah and the Sacred Grove (where Joseph Smith’s vision took place), and Niagara is only a relatively short drive away from there, so off we went.

In the end, we were all very glad we did. I don’t know if we took a bad route in last time, or if COVID did in a whole bunch of the businesses that were hawking the cheap stuff, but this time around, it felt like a completely different place. Last time, we basically drove in, parked, looked around for a bit, and then left. This time. we spent three or four hours.

It helped that there was much more to the place than the one overlook we saw last time. Between the Maid of the Mist and the Cavern of Winds (or whatever it was called), I could easily see how people spend multiple days at the park. Everyone enjoyed themselves, though it was much hotter that day than it had been for the last while.

As a sidenote, we had dinner at a place called Zaika. An Indian buffet that I thought was fantastic. My family wasn’t as big of fans, simply because it was super spicy. The one drawback to the place was that they had a rule where if you didn’t eat more than a half pound of food (leaving it on your plate), then you had to pay $10/pound for everything that was wasted. Honestly, I think that’s a good policy and would help to reduce waste at buffets everywhere. However, when your family is all excited to eat the food, and then they discover that much of what they put on their plate is too spicy for them . . .

Let’s just say I ate a lot of Indian food.

Anyway. I now officially give Niagara Falls a thumbs up. I know my opinion has a lot of weight in the world, and I’m sure Niagara is breathing easier now, knowing they’ve passed my examination.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this DON’T GO TO SLEEP Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

2023 Vacation Report: Ben & Jerry’s Factory Tour

I knew we were heading from Maine over to upstate New York, since we wanted to see some church history sites. The trouble with that direction is that there really isn’t much in the way of “short stops to check out” on the way. Also, there are no real highways that go east to west over there, so it would take a long time and have plenty of windy roads.

After some research, I found out that Ben & Jerry’s factory is pretty much right along the way, however, and who doesn’t like Ben & Jerry’s? (Ironically, after I visited, Republicans came out against the company because it endorsed giving Mount Rushmore back to the original owners, but we’re talking about ice cream today, folks. I’m going to leave that be.)

It turns out, that factory is the #1 tourist attraction in Vermont. They release tickets for their tours two weeks in advance, and I was sure to hop on and get our reservations right when I could, since I only had a small window of times that would actually work for us. I’m glad I did, as the tours sold out. There were way more people there than I expected. The line for ice cream must have been around 45 minutes long. In the rain. And people were still waiting for it.

We skipped the ice cream line, since the tour had a free sample at the end of it. (Mind you, the tour’s about $5, so “free” isn’t exactly accurate. That said, I didn’t feel like I was shortchanged at all, especially once I looked at what they were charging for ice cream at the shop there.)

It’s a half hour tour that involves a video that talks about the history of the company, followed by a look at the factory floor, and then a stop for the ice cream sample. Short, sweet, and to the point. I found out they have two other factories, and that they put out a whoooooole ton of ice cream. I also found out the company has been quite liberal right from the get go. They back up their talk by paying workers fairly, and by sourcing their ingredients fairly as well. I was pretty impressed with the operation, honestly.

There’s also a “flavor graveyard” at the site, that lists all the flavors that have been laid to rest over the years, along with a short funny poem about what happened. We all got a kick out of that.

When you add in a decent playground for younger kids, you’re left with a pretty darn appealing stop on a road trip. Was it enough for me to want to make a trip there just for the tour? Well, no. I’d be surprised if you found more than an hour’s worth of things to do there, unless the ice cream line is really long. But if you’re passing through the area, it’s very much worth a stop.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this DON’T GO TO SLEEP Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.