No, I don’t think they should make a video game based on airport security…. though it might be a really hot seller if you give it a “catch the terrorist” twist. I’m thinking about airport security because all the confusion of metal detectors and taking laptops out of their cases and x-ray machines caused me to lose my wallet. Let me explain: laptops have to go in their own bin and any metal you’re carrying, obviously, is going to set off the metal detector. So I took all the stuff in my pockets, tin of altoids mints, my wallet, etc. and put it in the now empty laptop bag to go through the x-ray machine, while I walked through the metal detector, metal-free… well, almost metal free, I had to take off my belt and send it through the x-ray machine too… that was probably what did it, the extra time for the belt, maybe it was a conspiracy by the security staff… By the time I got to through the metal detector, all my stuff was piled up at the end of the x-ray machine conveyor belt. So I quickly put my laptop back in its case… not realizing that all that stuff I had taken out of my pockets and put in the case in the laptop’s place was all gone. My belt came through in a separate little tray… it should’ve reminded me that I was missing stuff, but I was too busy trying to put it back on while walking, I guess. The good news is that I had my license in my pocket, due to the all the ID checks, and therefore didn’t lose it… but I’m living off cash mom has generously loaned me until replacement cards come. Now would be a great time to help me out if you’re local and owe me money. HINT hint. wink. nudge. cough.
…and video games. No, we didn’t just sit around and play video games on our vacation. We toured a lot of San Francisco… and those first couple days were strange for me as we drove and walked up and down the super hilly roads downtown. The first thing that comes to mind are those silly car chase scenes where cars are flying (literally) down those hills… but then, seeing the houses and the neighborhoods and the winding streets once we got out of the downtown grid a little bit, I saw visions of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas… where the city of San Fiero was based on San Francisco…. complete with Golden Gate Bridge, a district with rainbow flags on the light posts, a neighborhood with smoke shops and VW buses, etc. The hilly windy roads with the houses lining the streets, no breaks between them, were really quite accurate in the game. So that was a little weird… and then we took our trip to Alcatraz… and that’s where it got really weird. I felt like I had really been there, before. And I quickly realized that it was because a few years ago, I had spent hours playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 (I think) where there is an Alcatraz level that is very, very accurate.
The rest of the trip was wonderful and surprisingly beautiful (surprising in that I didn’t already know what it was going to look like because of a video game). Day trips to Yosemite, Muir Woods and Big Sur were breath-taking (Yosemite, in fact, tried to take our lives with a steep one-mile uphill foot path). The piers in San Francisco and Carmel and Sausalito provided a lot of fun window shopping and interesting food/candy options. Sutro Baths and Monterey Bay Aquarium were amazing. We really fit a lot in. Describing it all would take forever… I’ll have some pictures up here or Flickr or both sometime this week.
woot