Bloglet: As the Swallows to Capistrano

I suppose I shouldn't feel so bad about it. After all, Robert B. Parker wrote 39 novels about the same character (is there a record in that category?), so obviously he wasn't afraid to revisit the same territory more than once. In fact, there were times in the later years where it wasn't immediately obvious that it wasn't just the same novel, with some of the words rearranged... but I may be undermining my own point. But even with all of that, he's probably my favorite up-until-recently-living author.

When I planned our honeymoon umpty-ump years ago (all right, it was 1987), I went to all the hotel chains nearby and collected their thick little books that listed every one of their locations. Then I paged through and found the most likely prospects and made a bunch of phone calls. After that, I sat down with my Rand McNally road atlas and plotted the route.

The final destination was Boston, and when we got there we found one of those tourist guides with a street map in it. At one point, my lovely bride said she thought it would be neat to put her feet in the ocean... so I looked at the little map and said, "OK, we'll go this way for a couple miles and then turn and we should be there."

And in 10 or 15 minutes, she had her feet in the ocean.

We're going on vacation in a couple days. I've spent hours on the Internet, Googling hotels, checking hotels.com, looking for reviews, and then actually making the reservation. Now I have to go to one of the map sites and print out detailed directions... of course, I'll still have my GPS running the whole time as backup.

So as you can see, I'm back around to one of my pet topics, as surely as the swallows (and clearly, the swallows have a better press agent -- not to mention better taste in vacation destinations -- than the buzzards): even as much as I've lived it and read about it and written about it, it still blows my mind how much the world has changed within my lifetime, or even half my lifetime.

I suppose in the case of the trip, it might be a change for the worse; I'm pretty proud that I put together a honeymoon trip basically just by my wits, rather than making The Computer do it for me. After all, somehow the swallows still don't need GPS.