I haven’t posted anything new for the last two weeks because I’ve been incredibly busy. After our week of vacation in the Poconos back in August, we also went on a week of vacation to the Club Ocean Villas II in Ocean City, Maryland from September 17th through the 24th. The past week was spent recovering from our vacations (phew!) and getting back on track with life schedules and catching up with work. Throw in a quiet celebration of our sixth wedding anniversary and you can see why I haven’t had a chance to post until now.

We spent the week down in Ocean City, Maryland, in a timeshare called the Club Ocean Villas II, which is located at 105 120th Street in Ocean City, on the bay side. Our unit, #271, was on the “water” side, which meant we had to park the car and walk around the building to a little wooden boardwalk with no railings to get to the stairs up to our suite. Needless to say, having two very spirited and fearless young girls walking along what felt like a six foot wide boardwalk next to open water with no railings made me nervous, but they survived and we didn’t have to fish anyone out, not even once. The unit had its own private hot tub, which the girls enjoyed swimming around in when we weren’t at the beach or relaxing inside. (Yes, I know, I’m in trouble — even at this early age, my girls have a fine appreciation for hot tubbing. God, help me.)

I have to say, taking a beach vacation in September after school has resumed was a great strategy. We drove all the way down to the end of the Garden State Parkway to the Cape May/Lewes Ferry on a Saturday morning, making great time (took us just around three hours). It was great fun to ride this big boat for an hour, stretch our legs, and have some ice cream while we looked out across the water. Then, it took us another hour to drive from Lewes, Delaware, down to Ocean City, Maryland. I can’t imagine how grueling this drive must be in the heat of the summer with miles of traffic backing up all over the place, but at the end of September, it was a pleasant ride.

We spent a lot of time on the beach with the girls playing in the sand and splashing in the ocean. Luckily, the girls have my complexion so they tan rather than sunburn, but my wife — oh, does she burn — the first day at the beach, with no sunblock, turned her a nice shade of red lobster. We also decided to go to an amusement park called Baja Amusements (excuse their horrible Flash-based website, I’m just linking to it for posterity’s sake) on the other side of the Route 50 bridge towards Assateague Island. Speaking of Assateague Island, we also drove out there one day and saw the wild horses, which is special because we have a book about the “Assateague ponies” that we’ve been reading to the girls at bedtime for a while now, so it was nice to actually show them the place that the book is about.

Anyone who knows me well enough knows that I really don’t care for sightseeing. When I vacation, I vacation with my stomach — it’s all about the food. We went to the Embers restaurant for dinner one night, enjoying their all-you-can-eat seafood and prime rib buffet. Nothing like filling yourself up with mounds of snow crab legs and a hunk of beef. But, the best meal we had all week was had at Nick’s House of Ribs where we had a full rack of ribs and a steak. The girls really love their ribs; you can tell by the amount of barbequeue sauce they wear on their faces when they’re done. The food at Nick’s was fantastic, and Geoff, our server with the deep Keanu Reeves-like surfer voice, actually provided us the kind of speedy service that reminded us of New Jersey. (Oh, you never realize how spoiled you are about the speed of service you get in New Jersey until you leave it behind. You grow old waiting around at restaurants in Maryland.)

Here’s a quick snap of the girls striking a pose on the boardwalk in Ocean City towards the end of our trip. The wife filled her craving for funnel cake — of course, the girls indulged themselves with only the powdered sugar on top. No sugar binge is complete without cotton candy, too. It turns out that Suzie (the younger daughter) really likes the Cup and Saucer carnival ride they had set up. She refers to it as the “cup and teapot” because she rides in a cup and there’s a big teapot in the center of the ride. I don’t know if she’s going to be as much of an adrenaline junkie as her older sister.

As you can tell, it was a very fun-filled week. No, it was jam-packed with fun and we were constantly on the move. We were thoroughly worn out by the end, ready to head home. I think we’ll definitely be going back to Ocean City again for a future family vacation.

Earlier this month, we went on a family vacation, staying at the Split Rock Resort up in Lake Harmony, PA, in one of their Westwood Villas through an RCI timeshare swap. The accomodations were adequate — two bedrooms each with their own queen sized beds, a reasonably sized kitchen and living area with a TV with a combo VHS/DVD player. The Split Rock Resort, itself, actually does a good job at offering activities that really young children can enjoy, such as affordable mini-golf, a lakeside beach, an indoor pool, bowling lanes and a movie theater. At the end of the week when we were there, they were showing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which we took the girls to see, so that was lucky.

Overall, it was a good vacation in Pennsyltucky which, for our family, is unusual since the last four of five times we’ve tried to vacation there, we’ve had nothing but bad luck. I mean, we’d experienced things such as horrible illness that sets in after we arrive like explosive diarrhea, or our older daughter experiencing night terrors for the first time on the night we arrived, which prompted us to just pack up and leave that same night, or finding out that the resort’s indoor pool was closed for maintenance, leaving us very little to do in the off-season. Of course, people try to tell me that “it has nothing to do with Pennsylvania,” but we’ve vacationed in New Hampshire, Virginia and Massachusetts and we’ve only had these experiences when we go to Pennsylvania. So, yes, correlation is not causation, but when does it stop being mere coincidence?

What surprised me the most about this trip was that even today, in 2005, the best network connection I could get was dial-up. Yes, I do realize this is still Pennsyltucky after all, but I was naively hoping that the Poconos, being as close to New Jersey as it is, might have finally caught up with the times. I was hoping for some form of broadband connection, either wired Ethernet jack somewhere in the Villa, or at best, some Wi-Fi. I would have been glad to settle for having to sit my laptop down in some cheesy office in the main building in order to get connectivity, but it seems even that was too high-tech. Hell, when I asked the front desk about my inability to find some form of broadband connectivity, the person looked back at me as though I was an alien from another planet, speaking a language they didn’t understand. The notion of anything other than dial-up was completely foreign to these people. Come on, folks, it’s time to retire the buggy whip, already.

I guess the one comforting thing about this is that it’s exactly places like good old Lake Harmony, PA, completely oblivious of anything other than dial-up Internet access, that will keep companies like AOL in business for many years to come as long as they continue to offer some reasonable form of narrowband product.

Yesterday, we went to the Children’s Museum of Manhattan in New York for my older daughter Charlene’s birthday. (Actually, both of my daughters’ birthdays are in February so it was more a joint birthday celebration, but Charlene’s actual birthday was yesterday.)

Getting there wasn’t much of a problem and finding the place is easy; it’s located on West 83rd St. between Broadway and Amsterdam. The hard part was finding parking, which is no surprise in Manhattan, but what was frustrating was every parking garage in the two or three block radius of the museum all told us they were full, at 10:00 AM on a Saturday morning in Manhattan. Maybe I should have known better, but being that I rarely ever go into the City for this very reason, because I like to drive and I hate finding parking, but the whole experience of driving around for 30 minutes trying to find a parking garage was extremely annoying. In the end, we ended up parking on the street at a meter in front of the museum — limit of 2 hours on the meter and you get 10 minutes a quarter and I put in 90 minutes worth, or $2.25, which gave us until noon before we needed to decide if we want to refill the meter or not.

Now with the parking situation out of the way, we unbuckled the kids and made our way into the museum. Normally, for two adults and two kids, you’d be looking at paying $32 for admission. However, there are advantages of working for big companies who invest in the communities where they have offices — they donate to these kinds of places! And, the museum offers free admission to corporate members: All Corporate Member employees receive unlimited FREE admission for themselves and their immediate family. Just present your company Photo ID card at the Museum’s admission desk and enjoy 5 floors of exciting exhibitions and programs for FREE! So, I just brought along my badge, showed it at the door and we all got in for free, which was awesome. Having been spared extortion at the parking garages, we only ended up shelling out the $2.25 at the meter and a couple of dollars in the gift shop, this was an incredibly good deal.

As an aside, while driving around looking for a parking garage, we managed to catch a glimpse of one section of The Gates exhibit at Central Park. It’s probably my inability to appreciate what others consider “art”, but man, what’s the big f’ing deal about ugly saffron-colored curtains hung up throughout the park? Is there some inside joke hidden in the exhibit (like a caricature of Winston Churchill only visible from an arial view) or something? I just don’t get it …

We spent the next hour and a half oohing and aahing at the Dr. Seuss exhibit on the first floor, which the kids really enjoyed. After a while, we went up a floor to the Dora the Explorer exhibit which had the kids running around happily some more. Going up another level brought us to an exhibit of Romare Bearden’s art, which the kids didn’t really get into and frankly, neither could I. Thankfully, all was not lost — we rode the slow-boat-to-China elevator all the way down to the lower level where the Magic Schoolbus exhibit was set up, and the kids had more fun! Finally, it was time for lunch and the kids were hungry, so we herded them towards the (free!) coat-check to get our coats, and head back outside for food.

While driving around near the museum looking for parking (ugh!), we spied a few Indian restaurants, so we decided since the car was already parked that we’d just feed it another $2.25 worth of quarters and walk to lunch. Of course, the first place we walked to was closed (!) on a Saturday. WTF? Okay, this is New York City, there’s places to eat every fifty feet, so we’ll just walk some more. Great! Another Indian place … which was closed too! WTF? It seems that Annapurna was just not on our side that day, so after asking Charlie what she felt like eating — which was “a hamburger, with lots and lots of pickles!” — we decided to check out a place called Fred’s, which is your average “Americana” (you know, burgers, etc.) bar/restaurant. We had a nice meal, a little pricey but probably not for Manhattan, and afterwards got back in the car for our next stop on the day’s itinerary.

The next stop was the New York Aquarium in Brooklyn. Fortunately, they have their own parking which cost us $7 (extortion). This place didn’t have the same sweet deal for corporate members, so it ended up costing us $36 in admission here, on top of the parking. Frankly, after having experienced the aquarium, I have to say that it just wasn’t worth that much money. Wandering around in the cold outdoors looking at small bodies of murky water, and peering through thick glass in the muggy air of the indoor exhibits, it’s hard to get excited looking at animals in captivity while listening to the tree-hugging conservationist propaganda. We left, children and adults exhausted, ready to head on home.

All in all, it was an excellent way to spend the day and I highly recommend people with young children to take the family to see the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, especially if you work for one of their corporate members. I’d definitely go there with the kids again. I’d pass on the aquarium, though, it just wasn’t worth it.