Lately, I’ve been sleeping fairly late—usually around 3 AM—because I’ve been going to my condo’s gym past midnight in order to exercise when nobody is around to minimize contact and avoid COVID-19 exposure. Consequently, this means that my schedule is completely broken when I have to do some­thing early in the morning. Unfortunately, today, one of the things I had to do early in the morning was catch a 6 AM flight.

I don’t work well with sleep deprivation, but I had no choice at this point, because I didn’t have enough time to reset my sleep schedule in preparation for travel. I considered staying up all night as to not miss my flight, but every time I try to stay up late, I suffer from an overwhelming wave of drow­si­ness, so I ended up taking two two-hour naps, then slept on the plane.

Once in a while, I woke up from my naps on the plane to look out the window. One of the times, we were flying over what appeared to be the Michigan area, when I saw… a massive blanket of snow covering everything. I took a photograph.

Shortly afterwards, the snow cleared up, and the view turned into this:

Very confused as to how this section of the country had literally no snow, I looked back to the photograph that I had just taken prior to this. I then dis­covered that I was suffering from severe sleep deprivation and/or stupidity, and that it wasn’t actually a blanket of snow that we were flying over, but rather, a blanket of clouds.

This should serve as proof that you should never interrupt me while I’m sleeping, otherwise I will forget the difference between snow and clouds, among doing other incredibly brain-dead things.

After just shy of five hours of travel time across two flights (with a layover), I finally made it to Dulles International Airport in Dulles, Virginia.

Upon landing, I hopped on the rental car shuttle and got a ride to Enterprise Rent-a-Car, my preferred car rental company. As the shuttle was turning into the rental lot, my face literally turned into the heart eyes emoji. I spotted a Ram Rebel.

I booked a mid-size crossover because I plan on touring Washington, D.C., and I imagined that it will be much more convenient to have a smaller vehicle to find street parking more easily, as opposed to having a full-size pickup truck like I usually get, which basically takes up one and a half street parking spots.

But when you see a Ram Rebel on the lot and Enterprise offers it to you, you cannot say no.

So I have a Ram Rebel now.

I already know I am going to regret this decision.

My main takeaways (big-picture ones, that weren’t already covered in previous blog posts):

• Seattle is surprisingly dynamically terraneous. It has a very diverse mixture of water, hills, vegetation, and man-made structures. Most cities have a “theme” to them, but Seattle feels like its theme is just having a little bit of everything.
• Cities near the ocean are usually unbearably humid for me, but for some reason, Seattle didn’t actually really seem that humid.
• It’s nice going places with a travel companion. If I hadn’t brought my assistant Monica along with me, I probably wouldn’t have had the motivation to explore the city as much as I did, and the trip definitely wouldn’t have been as fun.
• Even though I’ve seen all the hate towards law enforcement associated with the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests on the news, it was still ex­treme­ly unsettling to see all the anti-police vandalism in-person in downtown Seattle at the former site of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.
• As an extension of my previous point, walking around Capitol Hill made me realize that maybe politics does actually matter, and that the proper political balance of a city might be something that is important to consider when picking a home. It was perplexing to me that, even two months after the reclamation of CHAZ, the city government still hasn’t properly cleaned it up.

I also have a handful of food photos that didn’t fit in other blog posts. Funny enough, I’m going to start off the “food photos” section with a photo of the Gum Wall (does the gum count as food?), which ended up being just as repulsive in-person as I assumed it was from others’ photos.

One of my first meals of Seattle was a chashu rice bowl from Menya Musashi Tsukemen & Ramen in the Pike/Pine corridor. It was actually cooked shock­ing­ly well—the meat had a deep, rich flavor; the egg was just the perfect amount of runny; and the vegetables added a subtle crisp to balance out the texture of the overall dish

The first meal we had together with the “full crew” after everyone flew in was at the Dreamland Bar & Diner in Fremont. When I go to a new restaurant, I like trying their “specialty” dish. One way to determine their signature dish is to see what’s named after the restaurant. I used this strategy for Dream­land and got the Dreamland burger. It wasn’t stellar, but it wasn’t bad, either.

The most expensive dish I had was some baked Alaskan halibut from Anthony’s Pier 66 & Bell Street Diner in Belltown. The fish was nice, but the por­tion size was disappointingly small, and at right around US$50 with tax and tip included, I definitely don’t think it was worth it.

And finally, I feel like this wouldn’t be a proper end-of-travel blog post anymore without a rental car review.

I usually book a pickup truck, but because I was the designated driver for our production crew, I got an SUV instead so we could transport all their gear in safety, as rental pickup trucks generally do not come with tonneau covers. I requested an American SUV, but unfortunately, they didn’t have any avail­able, so I ended up driving away with a 2019 Hyundai Tucson.

The Tucson ended up having the same issue that I tend to have with most other Asian-manufactured vehicles with low-end engines, which is that the accelerator pedal and the brake pedal are completely off-parallel. What I mean by that is that you literally have to floor the accelerator in order to get the vehicle to show any semblance of movement, but even a slight tap on the brakes will make you feel like you’re a teenager learning how to drive with Brembos.

Even with me regularly flooring the accelerator, though, the crossover still managed to average 30 miles per gal­lon throughout my whole trip, which I found to be impressive (I imagine that if I drove my personal pickup truck like I did this SUV, I would prob­a­bly be looking at something close to 14 MPG). I guess the high fuel economy is reasonable and expected, though—this is a relatively small vehicle that seemed to be designed for efficiency.

If you’re a patient individual who drives for utility rather than fun, and you’re looking for an affordable small crossover, then I think the Hyundai Tucson wouldn’t be bad, especially considering how reliable Hyundai’s vehicles have gotten lately. But if you’re looking for something capable, or are already used to the power and torque of a pickup truck … hard pass.

And with that trip, I add two additional states—Washington and Oregon—to my list of visited states, bringing my total up to 23 out of 50.

Setting the record for what I believe is the most I’ve ever driven in a single day, Monica and I set off this morning for Portland, Oregon, a three-hour drive down south from where we’re staying in Seattle. Unfortunately, our Seattle trip isn’t long enough for us to be able to spend more time in Portland, so we were only able to allocate a single day for the cause, and did the reverse three-hour drive straight back to Seattle upon nightfall.

Our former PUBG Coach and Manager, and current Acquisitions Assistant, lives out in the Portland suburbs, so we stopped by to visit him while we were in the Pacific Northwest. We grabbed some dinner together with him at a Korean barbecue restaurant, during which we proceeded to literally somehow start a grease fire at our table. After that gem of an experience, we grabbed some boba tea and went sightseeing around Portland.

Portland was nowhere near as interesting as I thought it would be, but at the very least, I can now check off Oregon in my list of states that I’ve visited.

I flew into Seattle–Tacoma International Airport today to visit some friends, do some exploring, and work on a project with Tempo‘s game development crew. I’ll be sticking around for a day shy of a week.

Western Washington state was one of the most interesting places I’ve flown into because of the unique and dynamic terrain. The first notable thing I saw in Washington was Mt. St. Helens… which I’m not actually entirely sure if it actually was Mt. St. Helens, because I’m not familiar with the area. It could have possibly been Mt. Adams or Mt. Rainier, or maybe the mountain in the background of that first photo was Mt. Adams or Mt. Rainier.

In order to align ourselves properly to land on the runways at Seattle–Tacoma International Airport, we did a little loop up by Seattle and got pretty close to downtown. My window wasn’t very clean so the photos didn’t end up as crisp as I would’ve hoped, but I think they’re still pretty decent shots.

I think Delta Airlines is the best domestic U.S. airline when it comes to COVID-19 response. Back when I flew back home to Las Vegas from Orlando, I intentionally took an inefficient flight path through Minneapolis–Saint Paul just so I could fly Delta Airlines instead of American Airlines, because I trust Delta far more than American. (I flew American outbound to Dallas–Fort Worth, and it seemed like American wasn’t even blocking off middle seats anymore.)

Delta recently made it into the news because it had an incident where it literally brought a plane back to the gate to eject two passengers because they refused to wear face coverings. I was already committed to flying Delta whenever possible before that, but with that news, I knew that Delta would be the best choice.

It seems like Delta is continuing to emphasize their customers-first attitude, because after I woke up from a one-hour nap during my flight, I found this handwritten thank you note sitting on my arm rest.

Florida’s weather is some of the strangest weather I’ve ever seen in my life. A single day can go from partly cloudy to blisteringly sunny to pouring rain to sunny again, then repeat the entire process the following day.

Another observation I’ve made while in Florida is that the drivers are equally as wild as the weather.

Within the first day of arriving in Orlando, I nearly got into a collision while coming back to our Airbnb after picking up sushi because an oncoming vehicle wasn’t paying attention to the curvature of the road and nearly drove head-on into me. I managed to avoid it by swerving sharply off the road and going up onto a curb. Luckily, I was perfectly fine, though Monica’s boba was not… and I spent a few minutes soaking up tea from the floor mats of the rental car.

Not only that, but all drivers in general seem to be a bit strange. Nowhere else have I seen people not follow the speed limit so badly… in both directions. I very rarely saw cars driving at the speed limit—it was either 15 miles per hour above the speed limit… or below it. I mentioned this to one of my col­leagues, and he suggested that the reason for this is likely because those driving under the speed limit are retired, and those driving over it are sick of the retired people.

On a related note, my rental car this time around was a Jeep Grand Cherokee Trailhawk. I obviously put in a reservation for a full-size pickup truck, but they only had one more available on the lot, and there was an­oth­er guy behind me who actually needed a pickup truck, so I let him take it and I took an SUV instead.

It was nice re-experiencing what a mid-size SUV feels like, because I hadn’t driven one of those for a while (I’m so used to driving huge vehicles now that a mid-size SUV feels very small and agile), but my overall con­clusion is that it’s wildly overrated. Of course, there was just the inconvenience of not having a massive cen­ter console like I usually do in full-size pickup trucks, so once I had two drinks, I didn’t have a place to put my phone and wallet. But, for a vehicle that appeared like it was optioned to MSRP at just shy of US$50,000.00, I’d rather get a luxury pickup truck any day.

One of the more irritating things about the SUV was that it had air suspension. Normally, that’s considered a good thing, but I like having a high ride height, and every time I set the suspension at the highest level, it would automatically lower when I exceeded a particular speed, then show “aero” on the gauge cluster. I’m not sure if there’s a setting that stops it from doing that, but I didn’t bother spending the time looking into it.

After we took care of all the business we needed to address in Orlando, we booked our flights back to our respective homes—Monica back to Dallas–Fort Worth, and me straight back to Las Vegas this time. Of course, it wouldn’t be a trip with Monica unless she provided me with a final troll to say goodbye.

After returning the rental car, we walked through the airport and approached the security checkpoint, when Monica told me that she didn’t have her boarding pass and hadn’t checked in yet. Of course, I facepalmed, then told her to check in so we could get through security. She fumbled around with her phone for a few minutes, then told me that she couldn’t check in.

I took her phone from her and looked through her American Airlines mobile app… upon which I discovered that the option to check in wasn’t there. I grabbed her record locator and went to the AA.com website… upon which I discovered that the option to check in wasn’t there either. Confused, we found a place to sit, powered up my mobile hotspot, whipped out my lap­top, and tried to check in from a regular browser… and the check-in link wasn’t there either.

I told Monica that there was clearly something wrong with her reservation, and that we prob­a­bly had to check in in-person. We exited the main area of the airport out near the en­trance and went on one of the American Airlines self-service kiosks to check in… and we couldn’t check in there either. Now just bewildered in confusion, we stood in the line for customer service and waited for a representative to help us out.

The representative helped us discover the problem. Our travel date was July 30. Monica ac­ci­den­tal­ly booked her flight for August 13.

Orlando International Airport is interesting. It takes the concept of “airport hotel” to a whole new level. I’m not sure if this is more common in other countries, but throughout all my travels, I have never seen an airport hotel actually physically literally be inside the airport. Apparently that is the case for Orlando.

After we made it through security, unfortunately, I discovered that The Club MCO in Terminal B, Concourse 4 was temporarily closed due to COVID-19. I could’ve gone to the one in Terminal A, Concourse 1, but because of the way that Orlando International Airport is laid out, that would mean I would have to exit security, go back through security on the opposite side of the airport, then exit security again and come back to the security check­point on this side of the airport to board my flight. I decided it wasn’t worth the trouble, so I just found myself a nice wooden bench to sit and work on.

I’m not really a big fan of how American Airlines is responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. Apparently they aren’t blocking out middle seats, and the flights are packed way too full—Monica and my flight from DFW to MCO was nearly at capacity. Because of this, I decided to take Delta Airlines back home (which is my preferred airline anyway), which meant my layover back to Las Vegas was in Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport instead of Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport.

I visited Minneapolis once before for X Games Minneapolis 2019, so it was nice seeing it again.

Taking the inefficient flight path via Delta up northwest instead of straight west did mean that my travel day was right around 8 hours instead of 6.5 on American (or potentially as low as 5 if I took Spirit or Frontier, but there’s no way I would’ve done that), but I personally think it was worth it for my own safety. At least I got some extra Delta Medallion-qualifying miles for the extra distance traveled.

Home, sweet home.