Digging Up The Daylilies

Last fall we booked a trip for this past week with a "surprise travel" agency -- you give them dates and a budget and fill out a "dating profile" for cities, and they plan something for you, tell you what time to show up at the airport (pre-dawn, in our case), and give you your boarding passes and other details on the morning of your departure. We've done this twice before, one plane trip and one road trip. We haven't flown since before Covid, but we've wanted to go somewhere farther than driving distance, and this definitely qualified. Once again, Pack Up & Go picked out an interesting destination that was not otherwise on our radar.

Our information packet informed us that Denver gets 300 days a year of sun, but we got two days of rain before clearing for our last day there. Ah well -- best-laid plans and all that! So we did not get to experience the beautiful scenic views of the Rockies, but there was plenty else to do. And we caught some glimpses on the last day when it cleared up.

Our hotel was downtown ("LoDo", i.e. lower downtown -- all the neighborhoods have abbreviations like that, we learned) and we could walk to lots of places. We stayed at the Maven at Dairy Block, where we had a very comfortable and kind of quirky suite. (I now regret not taking some pictures to share.) The people at the front desk were excellent -- helpful, friendly, English-fluent, and available at all hours.

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Denver has at least two art museums. We went to the "regular" one (as opposed to the contemporary-art one) and found a huge, well-presented collection. Seven floors (we ran out of steam before we finished), decent introductions to the various rooms, and the placards were of a font size and placement that I could read them. Aside: I expected Saint George's dragon to be bigger:

We also visited the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (I mean, do you know us? of course we did :-) ), which had a couple special exhibits in addition to their usual offerings. Both were very good. One was "Angkor: the Lost Empire of Cambodia" -- at some other museum in some other city we saw a movie about Angkor, but this was our first time seeing artifacts. This exhibit was free (with museum admission) and was well-done. It made me want to see that ancient temple in person, though I doubt travel to Cambodia is going to happen.

The other special exhibit was "Jurassic Oceans: Monsters of the Deep", and I'm really glad we paid for those tickets. On the one hand, I'm kind of at the stage where I've seen a lot of dinosaurs and what's one more? But on the other hand, this focused on ocean, not land, creatures, and they don't get so much attention. The exhibit was very well done in almost all respects, and had a mix of conventional displays (mostly fossils of course), short movie clips, interactive exhibits, and docents with individual displays where we could pick things up, ask questions, and talk with someone who's more of an expert than we are. The one area they could have improved was traffic flow: when we entered we didn't know if we were supposed to zig-zag or follow a left- (or right-) hand rule, and when it became clear that we needed to zig-zag (the exit was not by the entrance), the sequencing was sometimes not clear. We almost missed a couple side loops when we got a little lost in the flow.

The rest of the museum was mostly set up well. Some explanatory placards were behind glass next to whatever item was on display, and some of those were at a distance where I could not read them and (because of the glass) could not get closer. This was particularly true in the minerals hall. Many museums have this particular accessibility failure, but I was disappointed to see it here when the rest was so well-done.

Somewhere in the general exhibits I found this science advice:

We took a city tour (van, not bus), which was interesting as far as it went but at two hours felt short. Too late to do anything about it, we learned about tours that go into the mountains and the Great Divide. If we were planning a trip to Denver we would have dedicated a day for that, but of course the whole point of surprise travel is that you don't know in advance so there was no chance to discuss that, and for a three-day trip I understand why they wouldn't dedicate a full day to that. We'll just have to go to the Rockies on our own at some point. :-)

When it was still raining but down to a drizzle we went to the Denver botanical gardens, which have both indoor (greenhouse) and outdoor parts. We enjoyed this and ran out of steam before we ran out of gardens. There was a small collection of bonsai, including this one that seems to defy gravity. I assume there isn't a heavy weight in the bottom of that bowl, anyway:

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Pack Up & Go made dinner reservations for the two nights we were there, and both restaurants were excellent. Root Down is employee-owned, locally-sourced, and veggie-rich while also having dishes for meat-eaters. Everything we had was tasty and there were some unexpected combinations, like the carrot & red curry soup with apple-pear chutney. We each had soup and an entree and we shared a small plate, and we were too full for dessert. (To their credit, they have a very small dessert offering, an espresso truffle for $2, which we decided we could make room for. That is clever planning.) Service was excellent.

The other was Tamayo in Larimer Square, a high-end Mexican restaurant. Let me tell you, they had a vegetarian entree that was basically roasted cauliflower with interesting sauces, and it was wonderful! (It was the colored cauliflower, too -- my plate had green and purple along with white.) The salsas (three) that we had with chips were flavorful and ranged from mild to hot. The menu annotates every item with allergens, along with the usual vegetarian and vegan markers. Dani had some member of the steak family that used Mexican seasonings that he said was good.

Pack Up & Go asks about your interests, and one of the items you can check off is theatre. We did, and they booked us for a show -- which turned out to be one we saw within the last two years, but of course they couldn't know that and we wouldn't have thought to offer a list of what we've seen recently. We still enjoyed Book of Mormon -- I think I enjoyed it more than Dani did, but it was a very good performance (Broadway touring company) and it didn't feel as harshly crude to me this time as last time. It's at times vulgar and often sacrilegious, to be clear, but it's also very funny and there are good character-growth arcs there too. Our seats were far-enough back that I missed some of the sight gags that I know where there, but I still saw enough to enjoy it. Being me, I also started thinking about how, from a systems perspective, a surprise-travel agency could avert this sort of thing without spoiling the surprise, but those musings don't fit in the margins of this blog post.

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Airport security at Pittsburgh took about half an hour. At Denver, which was also right after the Real-ID requirement kicked in, it was very fast -- I barely had time to get my ID out and my phone ready with the boarding pass before we were being asked for them. The agents at Denver were more brusque than the ones at Pittsburgh, almost yelling at people sometimes; I wonder if this is the difference between mid-afternoon and the pre-dawn hours.

We flew United and the planes were large enough to have middle seats. When two people are traveling together, that means one of them is going to be in a middle seat, never fun. These ones were ok, to my surprise. And there was a smidge more legroom than I expected. I avoid window seats because sometimes they can be very hard to get in and out of (particularly since I've started to have a little arthritis in one knee) and always try for aisle seats, but I didn't get an aisle either time and it was ok. (I should remember in the future to use the free-text field on the survey to indicate these airplane-seating preferences.)

We crossed two time zones, which gave us more time on the ground in Denver in exchange for getting home at midnight. This was fine with us; if you do something like this and a late return before work/school the next morning would be a problem, you should say so when you book.

Well, that's the longest power outage we've had in a while, and we're among the lucky ones.

Tuesday was forecast for rain. Late afternoon we both got those loud phone alerts about a severe storm with high winds, incoming quickly. It was overcast at the time. Not long after, the sky suddenly got dark and we heard the wind whipping through, followed a minute later by hail. This lasted maybe as much as ten minutes, and then it stopped and the sky lightened up and we heard the patter of normal rain on our roof (which we had, ironically, just replaced last week).

About an hour later we had a couple power flickers and then lost power entirely. I'm not surprised when we lose power during a storm, but I'm not sure what it means when it comes later. We optimistically waited to power down the computers. (My UPS has a pretty good display to help judge that.) Eventually we powered them down, turned off lights that we thought were on and that might wake us up if power came back overnight, lit some candles, and settled in to read. I tried to report the outage (I assumed they already knew, but maybe the reports feed statistics that inform priorities?), but their web site wasn't loading and their phone wasn't answering. Cell service was at this point limping; a bit later we lost it entirely. (This would have been a good time to switch to airplane mode, so the phones wouldn't chew up battery life looking for service, but we didn't think of that until the next morning.)

Wednesday morning did not bring electricity or cell service. I put the solar charger out to soak up rays after using it to charge my phone. In the morning we took a walk through the neighborhood -- several downed trees or large branches including one blocking Forbes Avenue, no traffic lights, and no visible lights until we got to the center of the neighborhood's business district, where for a couple blocks places had lights. We went for bagels and free wi-fi, and in the afternoon went for coffee and free wi-fi. The coffee shop was overflowing with single people with laptops occupying two-person tables, but their wi-fi extended outside. The grocery store was dark.

It was at the coffee shop that we learned the magnitude of the problem. News was reporting that 450,000 customers were without electricity in the region. For context, the population of the city of Pittsburgh is around 300,000; the greater metro area is around 1M. A residence often has more than one person, though businesses are separately customers, and I don't know how those factors trade off, but still -- holy cow, that's a lot of people! We also learned that a couple people died, unfortunately, one from a live wire in a puddle and one from a tree falling on him. A neighbor told us that another neighbor had spotted a funnel cloud, though I don't know details and the news I saw didn't report this.

I had, to this point, avoided opening the fridge or freezer. In the freezer I pack meat pretty densely, and when we lost power I did some quick rearranging to shore things up even more, use thermal mass where I could, etc. Freezers can be without power for a day if you pack them well; fridges are another matter. I did a quick check of the freezer in case there was meat I needed to use now, and then made dinner out of things from the fridge that were safe right now but soon wouldn't be. (I am so glad I insisted on a gas cooktop. The oven requires electricity for the controls.)

Late Wednesday night cell service came back; the Duquesne Light outage map showed about 150,000 customers without power (down from 250,000 Tuesday night), and they were saying it would take 5-7 days to fully restore power and they were calling in crews from other cities as quickly as they could. The web site looked to be accepting reports now, so I logged our address just in case it mattered for anything. I began thinking about Shabbat contingency plans.

This morning (Thursday) there was still no power, no visible expansion of the powered area from yesterday, and not much change in the tally on the outage page. I identified some meat we should use for lunch, so we went for coffee early (kashrut sequencing issues, the reason I "never" make meat for lunch except Shabbat)). The coffee shop was again full, no surprise. The staff there did a great job of keeping up with what I assume is a far higher load than their usual.

Mid-afternoon today our power came back on. We triaged the freezer -- lost about half the meat despite my efforts, but fortunately we were about to restock chicken but hadn't yet, else it would have been worse. Aside from the things that don't really need much refrigeration anyway (like condiments), the fridge was a loss. (And those eggs were on sale! Ah well...) After the fridge had time to cool down we ventured out to Costco to pick up some things, and we'll get other perishables tomorrow from local stores that are now open.

We were out for about 44 hours. The status page right now says there are still 110,000 customers out, including about 15% of my zip code and 20% of the whole city. I don't know what the current stats are from other power companies. I believe them when they say it'll take 5-7 days to restore it all. Yikes.

Years ago, friends of ours got solar panels and a couple of those Tesla battery walls (before he went crazy, they stress), and they've ridden out several-day outages. I've been saying for a while that I want us to do something for backup power (we don't have solar panels yet). I think I'm getting a little more traction with that idea now, though depending on how the research pans out, I'm leaning toward a natural-gas-fueled standby generator, not a giant battery. But that's a topic for another day.