In order to avoid what Google Maps said would be a very un-rapid rapid transit ride, I Ubered into San Francisco on a Sunday morning to meet a friend for dim sum in Chinatown.
If you get something at one of the take-away places, there is a nice patio above the Rose Park Station at Stocktown and Washington St. where you can eat it. After Chinatown, we walked to the City Lights bookstore:
“Essential” marijuana is available down by the water, right next to the In-N-Out Burger that was closed by authorities for its refusal to demand vaccine papers (remember that California marijuana stores were open for the entire 18-month period during which schools were closed):
Transportation variants:
Then back to Berkeley for coffee the next morning:
Moe’s Books (Berkeley) moved all of the Gaza books to the back of the store (see A trip to Berkeley, California (November 2024))
Some of the books that were prominently displayed:
Nearby Mrs. Dalloway’s Books features works on how to spend most of the day reminding kids that they’re going to die when the Earth goes Full Venus:
I talked to a professor of adolescent medicine shortly after seeing these books and he said that it made sense for all teenagers to be in therapy because of their reasonable fears regarding climate change.
Housing is a human right, which means either a $3 million house from this real estate agency or sleeping in the real estate agency’s alcove:
Dove soap is too precious to be left on the shelf at CVS:
… we landed in Concord, California, rode on “Transforce” tires, were admonished to “Coexist” with people of different religions, and arrived at a Thai restaurant with an all-gender restroom:
The next day it was time to visit Berkeley, California. A house in my hostess’s neighborhood celebrates RBG, who refused to hire Black law clerks, and Black Lives Matter:
Although everyone I talked to in Berkeley agrees that taxation in California should be higher, there is no “Repeal Proposition 13” sign on the fence of this house worth $2.4 million and taxed at $1.3 million (referenced to its 2006 purchase price). Nor are any of the Californians who said they wanted higher taxes and that they hate generational wealth (unearned!) working to implement a 16 percent state death tax in California to match estate tax rates in Maskachusetts, New York, and other progressive states.
Two yards over, “Free Palestine” (this was a day before Donald Trump attacked the peaceful Iranians so the signs in support of the Islamic Republic hadn’t gone up yet):
Outdoor masking is common and so is wearing an “I’m gay” t-shirt, but it was relatively rare to find an intersection:
Californians love to brag about being rich and also say that housing is a human right, yet are happy to walk by neighbors who live in tents:
Californians also love to brag about their commitment to environmentalism, yet driving old cars that spew pollution is common. (Note that the owner of the 40-year-old Mazda 323, ChatGPT-estimated value of $1,000, was concerned about theft.)
Gasoline is $5/gallon:
Those who’ve converted to electric install tripping hazards on the public sidewalks:
Last month I stayed with friends near the north end of the Strip, near the new Fontainebleau Las Vegas (a $3.7 billion Florida export with a tortured history). The view from their terrace (note the Sphere towards the right):
They showed me the Las Vegas Arts District, usually bypassed by tourists who go from the Strip to Fremont Street. If you’re walking from the Strip you’ll pass by a dangerous area where you could lose half of your current assets and 50-80 percent of your income going forward:
The City of Las Vegas welcomes visitors from Maskachusetts with a billboard for healing essential marijuana:
Frida Kahlo dispenses advice, e.g., “the best way to succeed in a field is to have sex with a married man who is already successful in that field.”
After our light dinner at Ada’s, a gracious “goodbye” with the Fontainebleau in the background:
The Hunter Biden tour that I’d started at Sheri’s Ranch in Pahrump continued with a visit to the Crack Shack:
From there we continued driving to the Pinball Hall of Fame, which has an awesome sign:
The collection could use some maintenance help, unfortunately, and the ladies who were working there during our visit were not cheerful ambassadors for the passion. That said, there are some unique games to try out. I’ll do a separate post about this place.
We stopped by Atomic Motors to look at classic cars being maintained and offered for sale.
(I’d love to have the 1964 Chevrolet Chevelle Wagon if A/C could be retrofitted! Also, note the rare 1974 Jensen-Healey JH-5, above, at $29,000 with 81,000 miles (how did they get the British-made thing to run that far?). It is tough to imagine today, but the British were once significant innovators and manufacturers of cars!)
Dinner was at Endo, a Tokyo-quality you-gotta-text-and-be-invited omakase restaurant with six seats, three chefs, and two servers.
What did it cost? I’m afraid to ask, but fortunately my host paid. I don’t think that it was cheap, however, because the sake pairing, which I declined because I’m not sophisticated like James Bond and can’t appreciate sake, included a bottle that retails for $550:
The one disappointing aspect of the meal was that nobody expressed concerns about the U.S. economy. I was fully prepared to respond, “I share your anxiety. In fact, I don’t know where my next slice of A5 Japanese Wagyu is going to come from.”
We visited Red Rock Canyon, which is now so crowded that reservations are required but at the same time not crowded enough for the Federales to build a real bathroom in the middle (and maybe a restaurant?):
A school group of perhaps 60 kids was visiting at the same time. Out of the 60, I noticed 1 white girl (“it’s not a replacement”).
We hit Din Tai Fung inside ARIA for late lunch and then enjoyed the Chinese New Year decorations:
Then I walked through Caesar’s Palace, riding the circular escalators (a Mitsubishi innovation):
I saw Wizard of Oz at The Sphere. It’s been extended visually to fill the massive screen and cut down in time to 1:15. Massive fans simulate the tornado. I wasn’t a huge fan of the movie, but the Sphere experience is worth $150 (Sections 205 and 207, close to section 206, are probably the best value. The 100-level seats can be partially covered. Legroom is tight.). The Uber pickups and taxis aren’t handled all that smoothly so it might make sense to walk to the monorail or back to the Strip rather than getting caught up in the crowd.
I finished the trip with a walk through Fontainebleau, but was underwhelmed by the public spaces. There seems to be more to look at in Bellagio or Wynn.
Where should a person of means live in Las Vegas? They’re building some new apartment complexes near the Arts District that will likely be fun for the young and childless. According to my friend, Summerlin is where people with families or who don’t tolerate urban grit will want to be.
My friend wanted to go to Death Valley so we landed at 74P, the Calvada Meadows Airport. A couple of enroute snapshots and then the PC-12 on the ramp, such as it is:
The runway is smooth, but narrow, and there is a fair amount of loose gravel on the ramp. Due to the 4,080′ length combined with hot+highish, very few jets could operate here. That said, it is much better than the National Park Service-maintained airports in Death Valley! (see Why do we have trouble maintaining infrastructure if we’re richer than ever? (Death Valley examples)) On the third hand, there is no security so it might be smarter to leave a high-end plane a KHND and do a bit of extra driving.
Enterprise in Pahrump is awesome and came out to fetch us far faster than the airport folks could bring over a fuel truck. Navigating to the most famous Pahrump establishments is challenging because Google Maps at first claims that they don’t exist:
If you need energy before meeting your friend Hunter at Sheri’s Ranch and want to celebrate Kilmar Abrego Garcia, stop at Tina’s Tamales for pupusas (“Abrego’s actual statutory withholding claim hinged on his claim his mother ran a successful pupusa business, which drew Barrio 18’s (criminal) attention”). It’s next door to Enterprise:
(the French bakery in town is also good, but is comically slow (30-45 minutes to make a sandwich) so don’t go there for anything unless it is premade or you’ve called ahead)
If you take the longer northern route to or from Las Vegas you’ll pass the Nevada Test Site for nuclear bombs (especially for “peaceful uses” of nuclear bombs, as demonstrated by the entirely peaceful Iranians, recently the victims of unprovoked aggression):
I visited University of Texas’s Austin campus last month. They seem to have about $10 billion in physical infrastructure, $20 billion in the bank, and the ability to tax 32 million people any time that they want more money. It is tough to understand how private universities, except for Harvard and the other Queers for Palestine League schools, can compete.
The buildings are beautiful and beautifully maintained.
First stop was the Ransom Center, home to a Gutenberg Bible and the Niépce Heliograph (1827), perhaps the earliest surviving photo. The special exhibit was of a collection of Saturday Night Live and related memorability from Lorne Michaels (a.k.a. “Lorne Lipowitz”):
In reviewing the memos among NBC network executives and producers, it is remarkable how many of them had Jewish last names. That era is apparently over. From “The Vanishing” (2023):
… a decade ago there were 22 Jews on The Hollywood Reporter’s annual list of the Top 50 Showrunners. In 2022, that’s down to 13. Other than the half-Jewish (and already famous) Maggie Gyllenhaal, you’d have to go back six years to find a single Jew on Variety’s annual list of 10 Directors to Watch.
Thanks to the odious new Hollywood house style that requires a detailed ethnic and racial classification at the top of all capsule biographies, we can see just how many self-identified Jews are in the Sundance writers and directors labs, or the NBC, Paramount, and Disney writers and apprenticeship programs—it is zero. It seems not being Jewish is actually a primary qualification. So much for Jewish control of Hollywood.
The school got some of Bill Gates’s money before it was all shipped to Africa (all without ever being taxed, since the appreciated stock was given to a tax-exempt foundation) and Sol LeWitt managed to harvest some of it.
I visited a friend on the faculty whose door is adorned with a diversity and inclusion sticker:
The publicly-funded school apparently sponsored a “Women and Gender Minorities in Computing Research Day”:
I don’t understand how this is possible at a taxpayer-funded school that is supposed to comply with the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. It wouldn’t be acceptable to have a “men-only” computer nerdism day, right?
I don’t understand why these ardent Democrats stay in Texas and pay taxes every day to a government whose principles, e.g., abortion care restrictions, they say they oppose. Maybe it would be a step down in status to take a job at a Cal State university, for example, but wouldn’t that be a moral upgrade?
Speaking of morals, an on-campus church reminds visitors that “atheist” and Rainbow Flag worship are part of a “Christian community”:
The haters across the street at the business school falsely claim that “The family is the foundation upon which the world of business is built, and it is a vital force in the local, state and national economy” and hatefully display an apparent cisgender heterosexual couple with their artisanally-produced child.
Speaking of false claims, folks at UT reject the false claim that SARS-CoV-2 has been defeated. Outdoor maskers was reasonably common:
The university includes its own art museum.
The restrooms are for “everyone”, but non-Latinos need not apply for inclusion in a significant-sized gallery:
It’s an established fact that Asian women are victimized be being “fetishized” and “undervalued”:
Black Americans are victims of “continued injustice and violence”:
(The King of Hate (Grok) says that more than 90 percent of the murderers of Black Americans are… Black Americans (source: FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program).)
The 2SLGBTQQIA+ community is victimized and “marginalized”. Sign: “Neel painted Bourdon and Battcock, two well-known New York art critics and a romantic couple at the time, in an era when very few people were openly gay in the United States.” In other words, they were hated so much that they were forced to make a living by getting checks from publishers for their opinions about art and they were denied the opportunity to work in a widget factory. According to Wikipedia, Gregory Battcock “was murdered at his vacation home in San Juan, Puerto Rico on December 25, 1980. The murder remains unsolved”. The marginalization of David Bourdon was so extreme that “he served as an editor at Life from 1966 to 1971, associate editor at Saturday Review from 1972 to 1974, senior editor at Geo from 1981 to 1983, and senior features editor at Vogue from 1983 to 1986. He was also The Village Voice’s art critic from 1964 to 1966 and 1974 to 1977.”
Migrants are celebrated with a larger-than-life statue: “Border Crossing is a tribute the artist’s grandfather and to the determination of the thousands of immigrants who have traveled across the southwestern border in search of a better life.” From the artist: “People talked about aliens as if they landed from outer space, as if they weren’t really people. I wanted to put a face on them: I wanted to humanize them” (isn’t it the very humanity of immigrants that makes them destructive to the American working class? Because they’re human they compete for housing, jobs, and welfare dollars)
University of Texas, Austin acknowledges that it is on stolen land, but refuses to give the land back and pay rent to the rightful indigenous owners who were “violently displaced”:
The “Oil Field Girls” who are “most likely working as prostitutes” (1940) seem to have dressed much more modestly than today’s Instagram creators!
For those who want to celebrate Maryland’s leading citizen, pupusas are available on campus:
(Kilmar Abrego Garcia claimed asylum on the basis that his mother’s pupusa recipe had resulted in gangs targeting him for death.)
Circling back to the first question… how does a private school of higher ed compete with University of Texas? The Gutenberg Bible alone might be worth $150 million.
The hotel is within a large business district that I had never heard of and that is the home of the Evil Empire (from a small airplane pilot’s point of view):
Would I take Brightline or Orlando again? It doesn’t make much sense for a family and takes longer than driving from Jupiter (partly because one has to drive south for 25 minutes to the station before heading north), but for a single traveler who will fly out of Orlando and then later return to a different airport it is awesome. It will make more sense if they can ever get a station built in Stuart, Florida, which is to our north.
In our continued celebration of Women’s History Month, let’s look at two areas where Americans identifying as “women” have been trailblazers: barbecue and pinball machine design and engineering.
Loyal readers may remember Austin and Lockhart, Texas: 10 barbecue restaurants in 72 hours. We had a good meal at Terry Black’s on a recent visit to Austin, but it wasn’t as great as we remembered. We tried Loro, an Asian-inflected bbq place, and thought it was okay (great sides, though!). The new favorite: LeRoy and Lewis. This isn’t an adventurous choice since the place is Michelin-listed. By the late afternoon they’d run out of brisket, but I preferred their tri tip steak anyway. The Frito pie side is perfect if you haven’t joined Ozempic Nation yet.
In addition to improving our waistlines via at least one bbq meal per day, we improved our minds with pinball. The Austin Pinball Collective is an interesting group of enthusiasts who park their 85 machines in an office building and hold an open house every Saturday during which the rabble can pay $20 for unlimited play. Members remain responsible for maintaining the machines that they place into the location so I’m not sure that it qualifies as a big convenience upgrade compared to having a machine in one’s house. It would be a lot easier on the members if the collective hired a part-time or full-time tech for the machines.
At the collective, we learned that Texas is slowly catching up to Chicago as a pinball machine design and manufacturing center. There are currently three companies in Texas building machines and there was an example of each at the collective:
Barrels of Fun seems to be the most established of the three. Their Labyrinth machine is kind of fun, but their Dune machine is the most beautifully lit pinball machine that I’ve ever seen. (You can play Dune in Minneapolis at the all-white pinball bar that I visited (consistent with my general observation that there was no mixing among native-born white Minnesotans and the Somalis whom they claim to love).)
A pre-flipper Stock Market machine, a Mars machine in case Elon Musk drops in, and one for Muhammad Ali fans.
Our other brain-enhancing stop was at Pinballz (original location on Research Blvd.) to play Hercules, a massive Atari machine with a ball the size of a pool ball.
The game is indeed quite slow. Despite the ponderous size, the game isn’t very heavy and it is possible to move it enough to influence the ball’s trajectory. Comment from Pinside: “The novelty is cool, but wears off quickly, and then there is not much left. It’s like the woman with the big tatas but no personality. OK, maybe that’s a bad example, because that novelty doesn’t really wear off.”
I recently wrote up our Celebrity Ascent cruise experience and also wrote about St. Kitts. This is about the other four ports that we visited. Most of our ground activities were planned by ChatGPT.
Barbados
Despite the fact that the U.S. had just kidnapped the democratically elected leader of Venezuela, about 500 miles south, the port was relaxed.
We did the 20-minute walk to downtown Bridgetown, past the Harvard Club of Barbados (the Palestinian flag):
We ducked into the Church of the Holy Trinity (1830; rebuilt 1999):
Downtown is quiet and geared toward locals.
The National Heroes Square honors Rihanna
The synagogue (1654; rebuilt in 1833 after a hurricane) operates services on Shabbat with 30-40 people attending, mostly vacationing Jews. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage site and a museum the rest of the time. Robert Kraft probably wouldn’t want to feature the historic Jews of Barbados in a Super Bowl ad. Like other Europeans, they showed up to make money in sugar cultivation, didn’t object to slavery, and moved elsewhere when the industry was destroyed by the 19th century sugar beet revolution. Intolerance isn’t always bad (see below; Jews prevented from owning enough slaves to work a plantation):
The synagogue was restored in 1987 and the Barbadians remain proud of it:
We got some ideas for repainting the Honda Odyssey from the taxi stand and headed over to the Atlantis Submarine dock:
Make sure to pay extra for the front seats!
As in the U.S., people are leaving the coronapanic signs up. Atlantis used to pack about 50 people into a small tube and the virus prevention strategy was a 5-cent mask:
A short walk away is the modest house where Rihanna grew up:
Back to the port:
Summary: a pleasant slow-paced island.
Tortola
Arrival:
We walked by the Supreme Court:
And Avis rental car?
To get to the Botanic Gardens where Donald Trump’s National Park pricing system prevails (foreigners pay 3X):
Science reminds us that “uncontrolled transport of plans and soil” is harmful to natives (uncontrolled transport of humans, on the other hand, always benefits natives):
Tortola is where a lot of people pick up their Moorings rental catamarans. They run a market where everything necessary for a good week on the water is available:
ChatGPT told us to go to Cane Garden Bay, which is more crowded than any beach in Florida (fewer people than on some parts of Miami Beach, but the sand is not nearly as wide):
We had a nice lunch at Rhythm+Sands. The obligatory Caribbean spiny lobster:
The port includes a #Science lesson:
Here are are parked next to our brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters on Norwegian Epic, which seems to follow an almost identical itinerary:
Sailing away, we see some of the same sights as those enjoyed by the Moorings bareboat renters, but from a higher perch and with about 10 restaurants to choose from within an easy walk from our berths:
St. Lucia
We did a morning snorkel trip on a catamaran that included views of the famous Pitons.
Marigot Bay, where I was able to tell fellow snorkelers, “That’s just like the yacht that our family had when I was growing up”:
It turns out that St. Lucia was the birthplace of two Noble laureates:
Celebrity warned us about robberies when ashore, but we never felt unsafe walking around Castries. (We weren’t warned about crime in any of the other ports.)
St. John’s, Antigua
The port is a bit unnerving, with locals aggressively hawking their services. We were reminded to stay safe by wearing a mask:
We visited the downtown museum, inside an old courthouse. We learned that people who lived in Antigua for 3,000 years were wiped out by immigrant Arawaks from South America. After they killed all of the natives, the Arawaks lived in harmony with nature by slash-and-burn agriculture.
Just up the hill, the Catholic cathedral (1845):
Then it was time for a water taxi to Dickenson Bay, a ChatGPT suggestion that we didn’t love. Most of the facilities are controlled by Sandals, an all-inclusive resort.
Sailing away:
Conclusion
Given our own beach-adjacent status here in Florida, I don’t think I would have wanted to spend a lot of time at any of the above islands. It is more or less the same idea as what we have here in Jupiter, but with much less convenience (can’t just drive 10 minutes to the Apple Store at the Gardens after the iPhone fails; can’t get 50,000 different SKUs at a Publix supermarket 7 minutes away). Coral reef snorkeling would be an exception, but there are denser coral reefs in other parts of the world.
Coming from the miserable Northeast or Midwest, though, probably a cruise around the smaller islands in a Moorings catamaran would be great or even just a hotel stay in Barbados.
As New York City moves toward a ban on pet dogs (consistent with the Hadiths; see Nerdeen Kiswani’s February 12 tweet that stirred up Rep. Randy Fine), a former Club Med in Florida has gone in the opposite direction: a Fido-welcome all-inclusive resort. Here’s a report on a weekend spent at Sandpiper Bay. We brought the kids and Mindy the Crippler, our golden retriever.
There are tons of great restaurants in Stuart and Port St. Lucie. Why would anyone want to eat three (or five) meals per day at the hotel? We met a lot more people than we would have if we stayed in a regular hotel and everyone dispersed at mealtime. Of course, not everyone agrees that this is a great system…
The setting is right next to a marina on the St. Lucie River:
One can sit on the shore in the shade and read a book with birds and jumping fish for company:
This isn’t a “drop off the kids after breakfast” place like Club Med. There are some kid-oriented activities, but not enough that kids or teens can form a tribe and entertain each other. Where the resort shines is in tennis. The grounds are shared with RPS, a boarding school for future professionals, similar to Bradenton’s IMG, though much smaller (Mindy the Crippler introduced us to some of the boarding students; they do academics 4 hours per day and sports training 4 hours per day and they seem to love it. Some students do all of their sports training at RPS while living at RPS, but then do virtual school for their academics, e.g., the (free) Florida Virtual School). There are group tennis lessons every day except Sunday and you can also arrange private lessons with RPS staff.
If the kids are getting on your nerves, the good news is that unlimited alcohol is included. Don’t expect high-end vino, though, and, in fact, the Kirkland wines are superior to what we were offered at Sandpiper Bay. Perhaps that was just as well because I consumed just one drink per day as a result. There’s a relaxing riverside adults-only pool that also has a hot tub that is actually hot.
Not too many people had brought dogs, but all the ones we met were friendly. They included two Corgis, several Doodles, a Spaniel, and a Standard Poodle. There were no hassles regarding paperwork (i.e., undocumented canines are not illegal) or weight limits. Dogs were welcome almost everyone in the resort, but not within the pool fences nor inside the various buildings, including restaurants and bars. Consistent with most of the rest of Florida, it was possible to eat or drink at outdoor tables, including at the main buffet restaurant, with a dog. Mindy the Crippler used her dog bed despite the sizing mismatch:
The resort is equipped with an arcade (pay per game) and free ping pong, pool, and table shuffleboard. The shuffleboard table was a magnificent 22′ regulation length example, but almost unplayable because the hotel managers hadn’t figured out that they needed to buy wax for it (I told them to call up Shuffleboard Federation and order the correct speed for their table; they also had no silicone spray that I saw nor did they have a wiper to use between games; all very sad considering the time and trouble that some wood nerds had gone to when building the 22′ playing surface).
What about the fact that the resort isn’t directly on an ocean beach? It’s a 20-minute drive to Jensen Beach, one of the nicest in Florida.
A lot of the staff members had warm and welcoming personalities. As with nearly every other hotel in the U.S., though, they’re somewhat understaffed. Expect to wait in line and don’t expect daily room cleaning.
How are the rooms? The family rooms are huge, much better than the family room we had at Club Med Michès Playa Esmeralda (Dominican Republic). The Club Med “family room” was just a regular-sized room chopped up with more doors to the point that there wasn’t anywhere for the entire family to hang out except in the queen-sized bed of the “parents’ space”. At Sandpiper Bay, the parents’ room has two huge sofas and plenty of space for the entire family, including the pup who got her own bed ($75/day extra for the animal). The kids’ room is small, but sufficient:
What kind of people did we meet?
A retired but super fit pickleball enthusiast from Albany, traveling with his wife.
A mechanical engineer from Tampa and biomedical engineer wife who came to the U.S. from Cuba at age 16 and eventually earned a PhD in biomedical nerdism (she could be featured on my four random immigrants page, though I don’t think a Democrat politician would want to highlight her due to the fact that she was unequivocally anti-socialism and generally pro-Trump (at least preferring him to the Democrat alternatives)). They were celebrating their 20th anniversary and had left their children behind with grandparents.
An architect from Delray Beach whose firm was about to finish a Palm Beach barrier island starter home ($100 million construction cost; I was afraid to ask what the land had cost or what his firm’s fees might have been; remember the WSJ says $200 million is the new luxury home buy-in).
a mom from Plano, Texas on a three-night break with two kids and a grandma (father left behind to take care of a cat; a great metaphor for modern marriage)
A pre- or post-trip suggestion: the Port St. Lucie Botanical Gardens (admission is free; donations encouraged). They’ve got about 100 orchids and several hundred cacti and succulents.
Conclusion: The price is fair. The location is great. The dogs are friendly. The food is about what you’d expect from a Hilton or Marriott. You’re not trapped as you might be at a foreign all-inclusive. If you forgot something, drive 10 minutes to Walmart or Publix. If the kids are bored, take them to the Regal movie theater or go another few minutes to Hobby Lobby, downtown Stuart, or the Play Money unlimited pinball and video arcades (one in Stuart and one in Fort Pierce).
Packing list:
your own ping pong paddles
your own Pickleball gear
your own tennis racquets and balls
your own shuffleboard wiper, silicone spray, and speed wax
Nearest airports: Stuart (if flying yourself), PBI, Vero Beach. It’s 1:45 from FLL with a lot of interesting things to see and do on the way. It’s 1:53 from MCO with absolutely nothing to see or do in between (you could take an indirect route from MCO, though, and stop at the Kennedy Space Center in one direction (allow a full day) and Valiant Air Command in the other (all a couple of hours).
Prices right now
I checked for March 7-14, 2026. The site gives the same price for two adults or two adults+two kids. Riverside life begins at $324/night plus ruinous taxes:
