Goodbye Wichita; hello Kansas City, Kansas/Missouri

July 9, 2021, 11:10 PM PDT by Parkzer • Travel

This post is over 5 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.

After spending five days in Wichita, I’ve moved on to my next destination. I mentioned in a previous blog post that I had a nice view from my hotel room where I could see a lot of fireworks shows at once, but didn’t post a photograph; here is the view I had from the 11th floor of the Wichita Marriott:

On my way driving from Wichita to Kansas City, I made a stop at the Bazaar Cattle Pens, a tourist attraction located right off the I-35 Kansas Turnpike tollway in Matfield Green. I didn’t really have much of an idea as to what exactly it was or why it was there, but I saw a bunch of cows very far off in the distance, so I snapped a photo.

After just shy of a three-hour drive, I arrived in Leawood of Johnson County in the Kansas City metropolitan area. I heard that this is one of the nicer areas of Kansas City, and Leawood contains some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the country. My hotel of choice was the Element Overland Park, a newly-constructed hotel under the Marriott brand.

I had a south-facing room, but I still got blinded by the sunlight due to a funny building nearby; the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection, allegedly nicknamed the “spaceship,” had some interesting architecture that would reflect the sunset directly into my hotel room.

I only allocated two days to the Kansas City portion of my trip, so I had to choose wisely as to which tourist activity I wanted to do on the one full day I had here. One of my friends used to live in Kansas City and recommended the Liberty Memorial Tower for some nice views of Kansas City.

The Liberty Memorial Tower was a part of the National World War I Museum and Memorial, so I figured I would also explore the museum while I was there. That was a bit uncharacteristic of me because I’m not really a fan of history (I literally quit my Master’s degree program because they required me to take too many history classes as part of my required curriculum), but museums usually teach information in a fun and interactive way, so I decided to give it a shot.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite as exciting as I had hoped. The exhibits were extremely text-heavy, and it basically felt like I was just reading a massive oversized textbook with some three-dimensional illustrations. I took some pictures, but there were a ton of children there, and I don’t want to post photographs containing minors. However, I do have one photograph I can post that I think captured my experience fairly well:

Yes, that is indeed a sign asking you not to interact with the interactive table.

The few short films that the museum had were interesting, and I did learn quite a bit about World War I (which isn’t a surprise, because I’m an idiot when it comes to history and it’s very easy to teach someone something if they have next to zero prior knowledge about the aforementioned thing).

And of course, for every meal so far, I’ve had barbecue, which is the food that Kansas City is apparently known for. I still think Oklahoma City had the best barbecue I’ve ever tasted, but all my Kansas City barbecue meals come in at a comfortable second place. (I also think I just got really lucky with the BBQ restaurant I picked in Oklahoma City, because they had magical melt-in-your-mouth meat that I didn’t know was possible.)

My original plan was to go to Des Moines next, but for some reason, the cheapest hotels, even at promotional rates, were about double what I expected if I didn’t want to stay about 50 miles out from the city (my best guess is that they have some special event going on right now).

So, instead, I decided to reroute my path to Springfield, the capital of Illinois, because I figured that, having lived in the state for around two decades growing up, it would seem reasonable to visit the Capitol at least once.

Hello Wyoming

June 27, 2021, 4:20 PM PDT by Parkzer • Travel

Instead of going from Salt Lake City to Denver by heading back down south and driving through I-70, I instead chose to go through I-80 so I could hit Wyoming on the way there. I’m told that the drive through I-70 is much prettier, but I also took this route sort of as a way to plan ahead for the future—I figured that, if I’m traveling to Denver again with other people, it is much more likely for us to drive through I-70 rather than I-80. For the sake of trying to seize the opportunity to do something I might not be able to again in the future, I mapped out a path through I-80.

My first stop in Wyoming was in Green River, a city in Sweetwater County. I exited off I-80 and took a break at Thomas Moran Park, where the Green River Chamber of Commerce and Visitor Center are located.

Off to the side of the Visitor Center was a little horse pen. I’m not sure why they were there, but they were my first two new friends of Wyoming.

An interesting thing I noticed about Wyoming is that I don’t actually get reliable cell service here. I use T-Mobile, but most of the time in Wyoming, I’m connected through a partner network. The speeds I get are so bad that Google Maps directions often take a very long time to load, or just don’t load at all. The only functional use for this data service seems to be receiving text-only emails.

After saying goodbye to my new horse friends, I tried to search for a restaurant so I could take a lunch break, but couldn’t load Google Maps properly. I ended up just driving around the city until I saw a McDonald’s in the distance. I got a burger and tried to use the McDonald’s wifi, but even that was so slow that I still couldn’t load anything on my phone.

After my meal, I followed street signs to I-80 East and continued on my way across Wyoming, while realizing how much I take for granted a reliable Internet connection wherever I go.

My halfway point between Salt Lake City and Denver where I decided to stay for a few nights was Rawlins in Carbon County. My hotel of choice was the Fairfield Inn & Suites Rawlins. Luckily, the Internet connection at the hotel was surprisingly fast and reliable, so I grabbed an offline map so I could explore without fear of getting lost.

Rawlins is home to the Wyoming State Penitentiary. Having formerly been in law enforcement and earning a degree with a heavy focus on criminology, this was particularly interesting to me. Although I didn’t plan far ahead enough to get a tour of the active prison, I was able to walk in for a visit to the Wyoming Frontier Prison Museum, a tourist attraction open to the public.

The museum exhibits were free to access, but I chose to go on a guided tour of the entire facility for $10.

The recurring theme throughout the tour seemed to be that Wyoming can get to be a very cold place, and the prison’s technology systems were fairly far behind, so the inmates were basically freezing to death the entire time and would go out of their way to do things to keep warm. For example, they would purposely cause mischief so they would be “punished” by being sent to a different, “harsher” area of the prison—which actually ended up being better for them, because it was warmer there. Or, because this was a working prison, some would do everything they can to get a job in the kitchen where they could stand by the vats of steaming food that would keep them warm.

This prison was the set of the 1987 film Prison. Back then, the prison was set for demolition, so the production company made some permanent modifications to the prison, including adding an extra door in a visitation cell and drilling a massive hole through a concrete yard barrier. However, after that point, it became very obvious how expensive demolition would be, so it was left as-is and is now a museum.

My stay in Wyoming was as interesting as I thought it would be—I expected pretty much nothing, and there was a whole lot of nothing.

Another thing there was a lot of was rain—apparently it’s commonplace for it to be sunny one minute, then pouring rain the next. The weather was in the 50-60s°F, which is usually a bit too cold for my liking, but was actually very refreshing this time around because I had spent a majority of the month in a 100+°F heat wave on the West Coast.

Tomorrow, I set off for Denver, Colorado.

Hello Salt Lake City

June 23, 2021, 4:03 PM PDT by Parkzer • Hiking, Travel

This post is a bit delayed because of my broken eyeglass situation, but I’m finally a functioning human being again, and that’s what matters.

The trip up north from St. George to Salt Lake City was fairly smooth; I drove for about two hours, took a lunch break at Fillmore, then finished the remaining two hours to the Fairfield Inn & Suites Salt Lake City Airport.

As of today, I’ve been to 26 states and have personally driven in 20 of them. Out of all those states, I would say that Utah by far has the best drivers by a noticeable margin. I think this might be attributed to the fact that Utah is the only state that has abundant signage educating drivers about various potential road situations.

A few of the ones I saw on my drive up were:

“No vehicles with trailers in left lane” and “No vehicles over 12,000 GVW in left lane,” to keep slow vehicles out of the passing lane
“Drowsy drivers take next exit in ___ miles,” because driving fatigued is basically just as bad as driving drunk
“Do not cross double white lines,” to stop people from swerving in and out of the HOV lane
“Legal to exit HOV when emergency vehicle present,” for the idiots who then proceed to never leave the HOV lane because they just saw a sign that told them not to cross double white lines, and thus impede emergency vehicles
“Fender bender take next exit and call 911,” to stop people from pulling over right on the side of the highway and causing rubbernecking traffic and putting their own selves in physical danger
“Fines up to $1000 for unsecured loads” and “Fines up to $500 for littering,” to remind people that there are actually punishments for this stuff

On the other hand, California by far has the worst drivers by an even greater noticeable margin, and could definitely use these kinds of road signs. Hilariously, the only vehicles I’ve seen so far breaking traffic laws in the Salt Lake City metropolitan area are cars with California license plates.

Apart from my broken glasses incident, my stay in Salt Lake City has been fairly uneventful. I like to avoid going places over the weekends because I don’t like when it’s too busy, and it tends to be a lot busier everywhere on the weekends. So, I usually stay indoors on Saturdays and Sundays and catch up on work.

Now that it’s Wednesday and I can actually see where I’m going, I took my first leisurely trip outside earlier today and hiked up to Ensign Peak. It was a very short but fairly steep hike; apparently it’s only about one mile round-trip, but my fitness tracker says I climbed about 41 stories during the hike up. I picked this spot as my first nature destination because it was a great location to see the Salt Lake City metropolitan area with vast, sweeping views.

Hello Lake Las Vegas

June 16, 2021, 11:13 PM PDT by Parkzer • Las Vegas, Travel

If you read my most recent blog post, you know that I just left Southern California—specifically, Long Beach—where the temperature was in the upper 60s and lower 70s°F. It’s incredibly jarring when, after driving for just four hours, the temperature is in the low 110s. Yes, the Las Vegas heat doesn’t feel as bad as the heat in other areas because of how dry it is… but once you get past 110, you start feeling like you’re cooking, regardless of how dry it is.

As my final stop prior to heading out for the real portion of my extended road trip, I swung by downtown Las Vegas to check my PO box and deposit some belongings into storage for the final time prior to leaving the city for at least two months. For my last few days in the Valley, I decided to stay in Lake Las Vegas, an oasis resort built around an artificial lake in the far northeast corner of Henderson, NV.

A little-known fact about me, mainly because I never revealed this publicly, is that, at one point, I was planning on purchasing a property in Lake Las Vegas. I think this community is extremely underrated, and as long as you don’t need to commute to the main city for work, living in Lake Las Vegas allows you to live a luxurious, upscale, retiree lifestyle. Being both an independent entrepreneur as well as a remote worker for Tempo, I figured that I would fit in well in the Lake Las Vegas lifestyle.

I’m good at identifying undervalued properties listed at below market value, and I know this for a fact because most of the homes I’m interested in usually get sold within one day. I found a new home community on the northern side of Lake Las Vegas, and I found a condo I liked with a price point of ~US$320,000.00. I went out with my real estate agent and was doing a final tour of the masterplan amenities… when we received a call from the sales center saying that someone else had contracted the property right before I was about to commit.

Needless to say, the homebuilder continued raising the price of the properties after this because they were selling so quickly, and as of today (just two months after this incident happened to me), the base price of the condo floor plan is now nearly US$370,000.00, $50k higher than when I originally wanted to secure it.

Seeing as I do have an interest in Lake Las Vegas real estate, I figured this stop in Las Vegas would be a good opportunity to immerse myself into the Lake Las Vegas lifestyle—at least for a few days—to get a preview of what it will be like living here.

Unfortunately, that immersion aspect didn’t really happen.

My hotel of choice this time around was The Westin Lake Las Vegas Resort & Spa, which is a resort-style hotel with a resort fee that includes a bicycle rental. I was planning on using that perk and going biking around the community, but considering that it repeatedly reached highs of about 115°F and sustained triple-digit temperatures throughout the whole day, I mostly just stayed indoors because I didn’t want to risk getting heat stroke.

This hotel didn’t have covered parking, so the times that I did go out to get food, I would get in my furnace of a truck and drip sweat while watching my air conditioner struggle to keep up with the heat. By the time the air conditioner finally had an opportunity to catch up and cool down my cabin… enough time had passed that I had already finished the round trip to the restaurant and was back at the hotel.

Because of this, my visit to Lake Las Vegas wasn’t quite as eventful as I wanted it to be. I do want to make another trip back here at one point, but it’s definitely going to be in the spring or fall so I don’t melt every time I step outdoors.

And with that, the true “nomad” portion of my journey begins. Tomorrow, I depart for St. George, Utah, a little over two hours north of Lake Las Vegas. Unfortunately, the current heat wave is affecting this entire area, so it’s also going to be debilitatingly hot in St. George, but hopefully I can either find some indoor activities or wake up early enough before it heats up too much to explore nature.

Goodbye SoCal

June 13, 2021, 11:50 PM PDT by Parkzer • Face, Tempo, Travel

My two weeks in Southern California are coming to an end—tonight will be my final night here, and tomorrow I’ll be headed to Lake Las Vegas.

When I first arrived here, I stayed in a spare bedroom at the company headquarters in Long Beach, but once we had two game designers fly in for work, I relocated to off-site lodging so our two staff members could stay at the house.

I originally relocated to TownPlace Suites Anaheim Maingate Near Angel Stadium, but that was an absolute disaster. The room I got felt old and unmaintained, it smelled horrible, housekeeping did an awful job, and the fitness center was closed. I’ve become a Marriott fanboy at this point (and am also a shareholder), and I’ve come to expect a very high standard of quality from Marriott; this Towneplace was nowhere near that standard. Luckily, even though the property was terrible, the staff was great and understanding, and the front desk manager let me shorten my stay to one night without incurring a penalty (even though it was pre-booked at a discounted rate for one week with no cancelations permitted).

I was able to rebook myself to a newly-constructed hotel nearby, the Fairfield Inn & Suites Anaheim Los Alamitos. While checking in, the front desk representative asked me what brought me to Los Alamitos; I told him a brief version of my story of being a nomad for the next half year, and he was amused and impressed. He voluntarily upgraded me to a larger suite so I would have more space to set up my workstation. The quality of the room was an astronomical difference from Towneplace. This Fairfield had everything I needed and nothing I didn’t need (i.e., it had all the essentials that I wanted without having any needlessly fancy things that end up being an inconvenience).

My past week has, in its majority, consisted of working and spending time with Tempo staff members while I still have a chance to do so prior to setting off on my journey. When I wasn’t using my desktop computer setup in my hotel room to get work done as efficiently as possible, I tried to spend a lot of time at the team house. One of the days, one of our managers invited me on a walk through Naples Island, which was good for sightseeing.

While on our walk, I noticed a black crab on the ground. I pointed at it and asked for confirmation that it was indeed a crab.

My employee confirmed, then swooped down to try and pick it up. After trying for literally a minute and a half, he finally managed to grasp it, then told me he was going to transfer it to my palm. I immediately declared that this was an absolutely terrible idea, and that I was probably going to drop the crab. He handed it off to me anyway, so, in concern for the crab’s life, I moved my hand over the grass so that, if the crab were to fall, it would at least land on the grass.

Unsurprisingly, the crab sprinted off my palm and flew straight off my hand. … It missed the grass and landed on the concrete sidewalk.

It died.

…

Okay, it didn’t actually die. It walked away just fine. But for a fraction of a second, as the crab was plummeting towards the earth, I thought that I had actually committed reckless crabslaughter.

Another one of our adventures was going to an ice cream shop called tsun scoops. The thing is, this wasn’t just any ice cream shop… it was an anime-themed ice cream shop.

Being a fan of anime and Japanese culture is quite commonplace within the esports industry, so I’m used to being exposed to this subculture often, but I never realized that it would actually manifest into an entire ice cream shop.

The exterior of the restaurant seemed fairly unsuspecting, but once you step inside, you are immersed in an anime world. The flavors are named after references to popular anime series (such as “I-it’s not like I like you or anything, Baklava”; “Notice Me Apple Sen-Pie”; and “The Meloncholy of Honeyhi Dewzumiya”), there is anime art throughout the whole shop, and there is even a little section with anime merch.

They split up the ice cream flavors into “tsun,” which was more sorbet and fruity, and “dere,” which was more dairy and traditional ice cream. I tried a sample spoon of Ramune and yuzu; neither of them were bad, but I didn’t think I could down an actual portion of each one of them. So, in the end, I went with a trusty scoop of honeydew and a scoop of lemon with poppy seeds, topped with mochi.

And no, I did not purchase the shirt.

For one of my final adventures, I accompanied our CEO reynad to Scott Robinson Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram, a car dealership, to help him purchase a new Jeep.

Even though they were branded as a generic Fiat Chrysler Automobile dealership, they didn’t really have too many Ram pickup trucks. They had a special 75th Anniversary edition of the Ram 2500 Power Wagon inside the showroom, which I immediately went up to and hugged (if you’re not yet aware, the Ram off-road trucks are my favorite vehicles, and if I didn’t live in a city, I would have either a Ram Rebel or Ram Power Wagon instead of my GMC Canyon).

I also found a Ram 1500 EcoDiesel out in the lot, which I also hugged.

reynad ended up following through with the vehicle purchase, so he is now the proud new owner of a Jeep Wrangler Sahara.

I’m generally never this active and social, and this trip was far more draining to me than usual because I’m on the extreme end of introversion, but it was definitely also more fun than usual. I’ll have plenty of time to recharge over the next month while I’m traveling alone, and once I make it to my parents’ in the Chicagoland suburbs, I’ll find a week in August to make a routine trip back to Tempo headquarters.

Hello, Marriott’s Grand Chateau

June 3, 2021, 1:55 PM PDT by Parkzer • Las Vegas, Travel

Last week, I wrote a blog post about how I’m going to be homeless for half a year. Besides the fact that people are accusing me of clickbait because, even though I’m literally going to be homeless, I will still always have a safe place to stay every day and night… my “homelessness” officially started on June 1.

My plan was to drive from Las Vegas to SoCal on June 1, but I ended up getting too busy with highly time-sensitive work and couldn’t spend the five or so hours needed for the trip that evening. Unfortunately, my bed and mattress were already tarped and deposited into storage, and my rental lease replacement was already moved into my old condo, so this meant I had to find some alternative lodging. I browsed through Marriott’s website for a nice place to stay for a one-day staycation and found Marriott’s Grand Chateau.

That was a huge mistake.

The room was fine; it wasn’t the nicest, but it was still fully functional. The problem, and why I consider this to be a huge mistake… is because Marriott’s Grand Chateau has mandatory valet parking.

So here I am, someone who hates other people touching my belongings in general, with a pickup truck loaded with all my stuff, driving up to the hotel entrance and seeing that there is no self-parking garage. I thought it would be a bit ridiculous to actually carry all my stuff into the hotel, so I open my back seat doors and truck bed in the valet lane and start shuffling things around. I pull out only one night’s worth of my essential belongings out of all my boxes so I only need to bring one luggage bag’s worth of stuff into the hotel.

Later that evening, I decided to get some food. I went downstairs to summon my vehicle, but I didn’t realize that there was an automatic kiosk system that scans the barcode on your ticket, so I was instead waiting for a good six or so minutes at the valet desk to wait for someone to actually tell me that I just need to go to the kiosk. After scanning at the kiosk, it took another 15 minutes for my vehicle to arrive. The following morning when I was ready to leave after checking out, I scanned my ticket at the kiosk and had to wait 17 minutes for my vehicle to arrive.

I’d say that the only thing I truly liked about this hotel was the view of CityCenter (which I was lucky enough to get, because I had a west-facing room).

To be clear, I don’t think this hotel itself is actually really that terrible. But, if you just need a clean and safe place to spend the night in Las Vegas, there are tons of other options that don’t come with these inconveniences.

Just to add, mandatory valet parking wasn’t the only thing that was inconvenient—Grand Chateau doesn’t conform with the standard Marriott Bonvoy program, so they don’t honor the 2 PM late checkout for gold elite members, and actually have a relatively early 10 AM standard checkout time. That, mixed with the traffic on the Las Vegas Strip and the inflated prices of all food within walking distance, and after my tenth minute of waiting for my truck the first time I summoned it, I very much regretted not just staying at a Courtyard or Residence Inn.

That short leg of my journey is now over, and I made it to Long Beach in California. I’ll be spending the next few weeks in Southern California, and then my real journey begins.