The Pixar Gates	Giant Luxo and Ball
Me standing next to Woody and Buzz Lightyear made out of Lego	The Awards cabinet with the Oscars and other awards
Me as a Toy Story 3 Action Figure	The Toy Story Aliens
Pixar Lobby	Me with Sulley and Mike from Monsters Inc.

The lobby is truly awesome. On the left is the cafeteria, on the right are the company store, the mailroom, the playroom and a kitchen. The building was designed by Steve Jobs and is setup to make “chance encounters” happen between people from different departments. It’s an incredible working environment. I wish I could show you what I saw once we went upstairs, but I’d hate to get myself and my employee friend in trouble. If you ever get the chance to tour the Pixar Studio, do it!

In the parking lot I started to search for what we could do. My father-in-law was also searching at our house since my in-laws were there to watch the kids while we’d be gone. We both came to the same thing: we needed to get to the Dallas Passport office pronto since it was closing at 3 PM. The site also mentioned something about needing an appointment. Also, the message told us everything we need. We’ll come to that later.

I rushed home and flew through my remaining packing, hugged the kids, and we rushed out the door. Along the way, I started calling the passport office to make an appointment for a rush passport. The earliest I could get was 8 AM the next day. Undeterred, we kept going down to to the office. We got there around 2:25 PM and ran into the building that houses the passport office.

As we entered the office, the guards told us that we needed to turn off any electronic devices and then sent us to the window about appointments. The lady here gave us a rough look when we told her that we didn’t have an appointment. She also asked if we had all the documents, including 2 passport photos. Of course, we didn’t have any passport photos. We asked the lady if there was somewhere nearby we could get passport photos and she oddly replied “I can’t tell you, you’ll have to ask the guards”. I took it that for some reason of policy, she wasn’t allowed to do so. Her parting words to us were that we’d need to hurry, they were closing in 5 minutes. Which I will note is 30 minutes before 3 PM.

We asked the guards and they told us the sundry shop in the building took passport photos. We ran to the shop and the girl working there was happy to help and told us it would take about 5 minutes. While Maggie was taking care of getting her photos made, I ran back out to the car to get “proof of travel” in the next 2 weeks which was something else we would need.

After obtaining the photos and going back upstairs, we noticed that Maggie’s printed ticket confirmation only printed out the first page. That meant that the flight details didn’t make it on the printout. Without being about to use our phones once inside the passport office, we had no way of showing proof of travel. The only other thing we had was a printout of our hotel reservation showing its address in London.

The lady at the appointments desk had Maggie fill out an application for renewal and looked over our documents. Hesitantly, she accepted the fact that we had a hotel reservation of immediate travel and told us to wait to be called to a window. At this point, there was only one window open and the lady there almost immediately called our number. She took Maggie’s application and let us know how much it’d be to get a rushed passport (it’s $170 for a renewal). She also questioned our “proof of travel” until we told her that the first lady had accepted it. She also made some comment about “when did you think you were going to make this flight and when did you look at your passport”? It was making Maggie feel unnecessarily extra dumb for having not checked before. I was thinking it wasn’t necessary to chastise us and make us feel worse. We were obviously stressed and were just trying to get things settled as quickly as possible to make our flight.

Finally, she entered everything in the computer and told us to sit and wait for the passport to be printed. After what felt like an eternity, the passport was presented and we rushed to the airport where we arrived well before out flight and found ourselves sitting at the gate at 5:00 PM amazed that we were sitting there at all.

So that’s how we got Maggie’s passport renewed in 45 minutes. Tada!

A quick aside: at 2:45 PM, each of these civil servants grumbled mightily about us being there at closing time. While I’m very grateful for our outcome, I could have done without the complaints about having the audacity of making them work through to closing time.

It all started when I saw this photo:

Then I started searching around for crazy places to land and found the following.

Low Landings

This is a series of YouTube videos of various low landing approaches in St. Maarten.

Next up is anding at Culebra Airport in San Juan.

This last one is a link because YouTube won’t allow me to embed it:

Low Landing in Honduras

Hong Kong

This is a representative clip I found of the landings at the now retired Kai-Tak Airport in Hong Kong.

Finally, I leave you with a link to a story about the most dangerous places to land. Enjoy!

We were already booked into a pretty nice hotel, The Wynn Las Vegas, and when we went to check-in, we were offered to upgrade to a suite for a pretty reasonable charge. I went for it, since we were celebrating for Maggie. All I can say is “WORTH IT”!

We had our own separate entrance and elevators. Up to the 55th floor we went and entered the room. Our mouths hit the floor.

What follows are some pictures of our suite and how freaking awesome it was. They do not do this room complete justice. If you are offered the upgrade to the Salon Suite at the Wynn, go for it!

Congratulations Maggie! I hope you had a great trip!

Our door, with doorbell	Our living room
Dining room	Our view of the strip ( notice we above the Treasure Island )
The Bedroom	The Bedroom TV
The Bathroom Entry	The Bathtub
The Shower ( with rain shower head )	The Bar ( back in the living room )

We had a very good visit. For Friday, our friends had things going on, so we took Brenden down see the Denver Children’s Museum. It was a very awesome place where kids get to just run around and learn about stuff from Firetrucks, to art, to being a vet, to sports. Brenden really liked the simulated grocery store where he pushed a miniature shopping cart around and picked up plastic vegetables and other fun things.

After that, we headed over to the 16th Street Mall and walked up and down it looking for the Tattered Cover Bookstore some of my friends had told me about. We parked, walked to the other end of the mall and didn’t see it. So I finally asked someone and they said “oh, it’s way at the other end”. Turns out, we parked practically on top of it, but we started up a block and missed it.

The next day we went up into the mountains and went to the top of Mt. Evans, which is a lovely 14,000 ft. When we got to the entrance of the summit road at 11,000 ft, there was a weather board there to tell us the temp in Denver ( 80ish ), were we were ( 60ish ) and at the summit ( 40ish, with windchills in the 20s ). It’s amazing how much colder the higher altitudes are.

After coming down off the mountain, we went to this cute little play place called Tiny Town. Brenden loved it! It has all this houses built to toddler size. He kept going back to the same ones, but he certainly enjoyed himself. We even rode their little train.

Sunday was lots of fun at a local rec center that had this amazing water park. It was all indoors and had a lap pool, a lazy river, a kids area and two slides. I rode the slides a bunch and so did Maggie. Brenden had fun in the water, but would occasionally put his face down in it accidently and surprise himself and start to cough water he tried to breathe.

We had a lot of fun with our friends and their family. Brenden got to watch 3 older boys ( ages 2 – 5 ) and learned a bunch, like how to go up and down stairs. He just started practicing it the minute he was shown how to go down the stairs ( he had figured out up already ). The boys loved him and I think enjoyed playing with him.

We’re going to have to make that trip again, but I think next time, it might be better to fly. Or to maybe have an RV so that Maggie and Brenden can run around on the way.

For pics, check out Maggie’s post.

The only thing that’s helping is that we are constantly busy, even after class as we need most of the night to continue to study to get ready for the tests we are taking for the certifications. The only real break has generally been dinner.

One cool thing has been the ability to use iChat to video chat back home with Maggie and Brenden. Although it’s been confusing Brenden that he can hear me and see me, but that I’m not there. He keeps grabbing the phone in the office like he wants to talk to me that way.

I’ll be happy when I get to come back home and see my family. Not to mention sleeping in my own bed. For one of the first times in my life, I’m having a hard time falling to sleep. I’m chalking that up to having so many things I’m trying to store in my head combined with being in unfamiliar surroundings.

One of the really cool activities we did during all this learning was to go to Cameron Indoor Stadium and meet with 5 assistant coaches of Duke’s basketball program. After an inspiring video featuring Coach K, we set out onto the court to learn various basketball skills leading up to learning an actual Duke Basketball play. During a break we got to shoot some hoops on the court before we executed the play against other attendees. I’m happy to say the team I was on won during our run.

Here are some photos

Me shooting some hoops, we got to keep the practice jerseys	The Krzyzewskiville sign that marks where students camp out for tickets to the game

After about a month of searching and looking at deals, we finally decided on a 7 day cruise to the Western Caribbean aboard the Carnival Conquest. We were told that we were being “brave” by bringing along Brenden, who’d be about 12 and a half months old for the trip. Even though it caused some interesting things to occur to his normal sleeping pattern, I couldn’t imagine the trip without him.

We left on Mother’s Day out of Galveston and looked forward to 2 days at sea before making our first stop. Those 2 days were a lot of fun and very relaxing. We explored the ship and I even played in a Blackjack tournament, where I almost got to the final table, but alas, was knocked off the board just before round play ended. Monday night was formal night, and we had fun dressing up and being fancy for an evening. We walked out on the main deck afterwards with Brenden to let him run around.

First stop was Montego Bay, Jamaica, which was very nice. It was cloudy and did eventually rain, but it didn’t seem to bother us. We shopped in the morning and for the afternoon we had booked an excursion to go out on a glass-bottom semi-sub to check out the coral reef. Once we got to the reef and after going over it a bit, we got the opportunity to snorkel, which I took advantage of. Maggie was a little scared of the creatures in the water and stayed on the boat with Brenden. They served us Rum Punch on this little trip and it was very strong, although quite tasty.

Next up was Grand Cayman which seemed like the shortest day due to everyone needing to use a smaller boat called a tender to get to the shore. The cruise ships are too large to dock because the water is pretty shallow. It didn’t help that we had an early excursion planned, and that it took most of our time during the day. We did get to stop and get my required Hard Rock Cafe shot glass ( I collect them and have them from just about everywhere I’ve been that has one ). We then rushed over to our excursion and were off to visit Hell, Grand Cayman, a sea turtle farm, and to swim with stingrays. All of these were great and the sea turtles were awesome, but being in the water with the rays was a definite highlight for me. Maggie did make it into the water and held on to Brenden ( who loved splashing and playing in the water ) while dodging the rays.

Our final port of call was Cozumel, Mexico. This day was hot, like really hot. Amazingly, none of us really burned on the trip. I chalk that up to 50 SPF sunscreen applied at least twice a day. In Cozumel, we didn’t have anything planned so that Maggie could take full advantage of the shopping there. They sell a ton of silver since it’s mined near there. Also, I got to go to a Tequila store which had over 200 varieties. I sampled several ( many of which tried to put me on the floor ) and decided on a nice smooth sipping tequila and one that was infused with pomegranate juice which tasted like fruit punch.

We had a scary moment in Cozumel where we thought that maybe we had overheated Brenden ( did I mention it was hot? ), but we did not. All the heat did make him pretty lethargic the rest of the night.

One more day at sea and then we were back home. It was a fantastic trip and I would recommend taking a cruise to anyone. In fact, Maggie and I have decided that cruising is either our first choice or our plan b for future vacations if we can’t think of a place to go.

Here are some photos in fairly random order

The beautiful water of Cozumel	Dad and Brenden hanging out before taking a nap
Dad and Brenden hanging out on the deck	The Burleson Family out on deck on Formal Night
The Burleson’s and the Stingray	Me “kissing” a stingray
One of the many towel animals that were made by our cabin steward	We finally caught a sunset on the last night on the boat

One of the things I’ve talked about on this blog is my absolute love of what I affectionately call “Street Meat”. You know those random food carts around the City. Not the hotdog guys, the guys making chicken and rice, gyros, and various other more substantial meals. I have a favorite of these at Broadway and 40th street. I practically ate there every day I could. It was $4 for a large chicken and rice with a small side of salad. I’d have them mix in a little lamb for a final price of $5. This was by far one of the cheapest ways to get really full in NYC. And after I became a daily fixture, they were really sad to hear I’d be leaving the City.

I had a friend of mine check with the guy to see if he would be open the weekend we went and get this, the guy opened special just because I was coming! When we got there he said he opened because he needed to train a guy on a slower day, but he drove in special to be there when I’d be around. I was touched.

I finally remembered to gets some pictures of things this time as I realized some of you have no clue what I’m talking about, so without further ado:

This is me and the “Street Meat Guy”. Sadly, I’ve never been able to understand his name.

This is him at work making my order. These carts have a grill, a deep fryer, and a place for drinks.

Finally, the finished product.