No Place Like Home

Good morning all you happy people in internet land.  Today I am going to try and catch up on sleep, since I have not really been sleeping well in a foreign bed.  Additionally it would be nice to make some progress on my “How To Rift” series… and since I have nothing but time to kill until we fly out of here Thursday…  it might be the perfect time to do it.  I feel like I just need a chill day to recuperate from the travel, since I have been operating at roughly 5 am on my body’s internal clock.

A Wild Lummy

The highlight of yesterday without a doubt was meeting up with a longtime gaming friend Atonal/Lummy.  I’ve played with him off and on in various games since the original Everquest.  So I have literally known him over a decade, but never thought we would actually meet face to face.  There is sometimes awkwardness when you meet someone for the first time after knowing them for years online.  So I suggested we meet up for lunch, since that in my experience is about the perfect amount of interactivity.

Not knowing the area… I asked him to suggest a place… so we met up at the Park Pub in Troy, NY.  The food was phenomenal.  At his suggestion I had the peanut butter and jelly wings…  which I was slightly skeptical at first but man they were amazing.  They were unbelievably messy… and there is no way to eat something like that without getting copious amounts of sauce in your beard…  but amazing nonetheless.  Additionally I had green bean fries… that I had heard of before but never actually had… or at least not had in this fashion.

We hung out there and talked for awhile.  We shot the shit about games and the like… and various fish out of water experiences I was having here in New York.  Afterwards I roamed around Troy a little bit before making a beeline back to the hotel.  I had to get back so I could pick my wife up from the conference for the day and run around.  He mentioned getting together today to catch a single A ball game, but honestly I am just too dead to do much of anything constructive today.  Would have been enjoyable, but I doubt he wants me falling asleep and snoring in the ballpark.

No Place Like Home

The longer I am here, the more I realize just how lucky I have it in Tulsa, and just how amazing that town is.  I always assumed that the Albany area was a much larger market than Tulsa…  but each time I search Google to see if they have a this or a that…  they lack anything that Tulsa lacks…  and also a lot of the things that Tulsa does have.  Additionally when we have gone into stores… they seem to carry far less than the ones we have near us.  It is just an odd mental shift for me… I went into this little adventure thinking I would be going to a much larger market… and realize now that they are quite a bit behind Tulsa in most aspects.

By my friends assessment, we are essentially staying in the slums of the Albany area… and this has been an odd adjustment as well.  The hotel we are staying in is rather nice, but the area surrounding us is very much not.  Each night we have heard gunshots, and last night there was what sounded like a major firefight concluded by some screams.  This is all definitely not something we are used to… two times now we have seen someone get arrested in the vicinity of where we were.  Last night in Latham we watched a guy behind us get pulled over… 3 cop cars, two cops with guns on him…  as he surrendered a gun on the roof of his car and was handcuffed all while waiting on a traffic light to turn green.

I can’t say I am necessarily frightened by any of this… the reality may not have fully sunken in.  Its like watching some surreal show playing out in front of me.  The only thing I am afraid of however is that I will hit one of the idiots that keeps darting out into the street to cross the major thoroughfares down here.  I have damned near hit 3 men on bikes… and come close to hitting 4 or 5 kids as they darted out into traffic.  This effect is the worst in the area near our hotel… and as we move away from it, the problem lessens.  But we have yet to really find anything I would say is the “good” area of town.

That has been an odd concept for me… we are in this area surrounded on all sides by untamed land essentially.  But I have yet to find any “new” construction… nothing resembling the looming housing editions we are used to, or the shiny and new shopping centers.  Everything seems to be built on top of essentially existing areas.  Last night we roamed from all around the metro area and made a circuit between Albany, Troy, and Schenectady…  and while we found a lot more of the same thing we had been finding before… we have not really found what I would call suburbs, or at least not what we are used to in Oklahoma.

Homesick

Maybe I am just a bit homesick.  Normally when we travel it is to some new and magical place, filled with new sights and interesting new attractions.  This delays the fact that I really don’t like travelling much, and that would rather just be in my comfy home.  It eventually hits… that feeling of “man I just want to be home”, but it usually takes awhile to get there.  Here in the Albany metro… there are not that many new things to experience.  While I am still having fun and enjoying myself… I will definitely be ready to go home to my house and my animals… and my bed.

Downtown Albany was extremely majestic… but the problem we keep running into is that every place we would like to take photos at… is either in a horrible area of town, has copious no trespassing signs… or there is no real good place to park and take a photo.  So while the views downtown were amazing… there was no real place to stop that could even vaguely take in the view.  All these old industry giant era buildings look more like castles than they do civic structures.  I guess that is part of it as well… there are so many remnants of past greatness that it is a bit sad to see the state the town is in now.

Everywhere you go there are signs of just how amazing a place this area used to be.  I took a trip up to Rotterdam and they have this massive factory… bigger than I have ever seen.  But the town surrounding it is this giant sprawling slum.  I guess I am saddened in a way but a lack of civic pride on an epic scale in these areas.  It feels like they have such amazing heritage, but have grossly squandered them.  Maybe this comes from the fact that in Tulsa we have been on a major downtown revitalization program, and every inch of these past structures is being reclaimed and renovated by businesses.  So our cool old stuff is becoming cool new stuff on a nearly monthly basis.

Wrapping Up

Well it is just about time for me to run my wife into the conference.  Going to try and find some breakfast and then come back to the hotel… crash for a bit and maybe work on the “How To Rift” series.  I hope you all are having a great day… and I hope none of the Albany area readers are now pissed at me over my assessment of the town.  I will be thankful to be heading home on Thursday… because I miss my place in the world.

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