Vacation Blog 1

25 September 2025

Hi everyone! I'm writing this portion of this blogpost from the Denver International Airport, waiting around at the gate for boarding on my flight to start. I'm on my way to Oregon today, a family member is having a wedding this weekend and so I'm heading out to be there for him. I don't expect this weekend to be super easy - both sides of my family generally lean red and have become a lot more polarized in recent years, the same story most people will tell you. But, I trust that conversations won't be that bad. This weekend is about my brother's wedding and I hope everyone can accept that. I'm not trying to go out of my way to make a big scene or anything, but I won't let myself get pushed around, and I won't tolerate people punching down on anyone, but above all I just want the wedding to go through and to get home unscathed.

Denver's airport has always been super interesting to me. The architecture is generally super cool, the entire campus has a visual style that I've never seen anywhere else. The airport's campus is also massive, way bigger than any other airport I've seen! After entering the airport's grounds, it took me 7-8 minutes before I even saw any buildings, it's crazy! According to the Wikipedia page for the airport, the 52 square miles of the airport outsizes some major US cities, including Miami and San Francisco; it's the second largest airport in the world, and it sure feels like it.

Denver International Airport is also full of insanely impressive art. There used to be a series of massive murals in the airport, but they seem to be in storage until some renovation is complete. There are tons of pieces of art, including this massive, wall-spanning piece right in front of my flight's gate. Everywhere you want to look you'll see something pretty to look at. I think it goes a long way towards making Denver's airport as approachable as possible, easing the burden of travel through an otherwise incomprehensible and labyrinthine complex of endless automatic walkways and trams.

There are also a couple gargoyles up by the baggage check/claim area, and I really like these guys. I ran into one of them myself this time around, and I wasn't even looking out for it, it was just there. Gargoyles serve as protection, to ward off negativity and bad spirits - at least traditionally. Having a gargoyle near the check-in terminals at the airport is definitely a nice thing to have, a symbol of safety to send you off on your travels. The gargoyles are pictured perched inside of suitcases, blessing our checked baggage to help make sure it ends up where it needs to safe and unharmed. I'd thank them for their service, if they were able to talk. Oh, to speak to a gargoyle... to hear about what they've seen from upon their perch, what dangers they've warded off... Perhaps I may write something featuring a gargoyle as a character, perhaps in a starring role?

TSA was way more relaxed than it was last time I went through this airport. I didn't have to remove my shoes, I didn't have to take anything out of my bag, nothing. All I had to do was empty my pockets, throw my backpack into a bin, and go through the mystery machine that scans you for who knows what. The TSA check itself was very quick, but the line was as long as you can imagine it. I think I spent 30 minutes in line for a 2-minute security check, talk about bad traffic! I always get nervous about TSA. I'm just generally a private person, and going through a little hallway where people have power over you, can see all your stuff, and have authority to touch you if they think you pose a threat is an off-putting situation to say the least.

It's 10 minutes until my flight starts, so I better put my laptop away. I've flown this way before, and it's not a bad gig. A 3 hour flight is kind of the perfect flight; long enough to give me time to get something done but not so long that I feel like I need to bring multiple hyper engaging things to keep me busy. I've brought along The Witcher - The Last Wish for this trip. Between that, work, and Caves of Qud on my laptop, I think I have a lot to keep myself busy with during this vacation!

PCHOOO (pretend that's the noise a plane makes)

It's 8:50 PM Pacific time, and I'm winding down for the night. My grandparents are talking about politics as they watch Fox news in their room, so I've got my headphones on and decided I wanna write something, so I'll finish this blog post now.

The flight wasn't bad, we actually landed way ahead of schedule. The airport in Portland isn't as fun and interesting as Denver's, though it's not bad by any means. It's definitely much smaller and much more navigable, at least. There was a small bookstore that I walked past looking on my way out, that had a couple things I've been meaning to check out for a while. There was also a bookstore in Denver, one that I failed to mention before that almost caused me to lose track of time and miss my flight. I ended up grabbing Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn. I picked up the first book as I got into Portland, shame though that I already brought two other books to read. Oh well, it's next on my list now. I've been going through the Wheel of Time and have really been enjoying it. I do know that, eventually, Sanderson ends up taking the helm after the passing of series creator Robert Jordan, so it seems reasonable to look into his writing now.

From the plane, as we were in the last leg of the flight, I saw an enormous grey patch in the forest. The scale of it is genuinely jaw-dropping. Something must have happened to here, and it looks like a forest fire. I had also seen patches of red from the plane. Like, red red. No, like, really red red. I have no idea what this is, nor how to research it. My extremely uninformed mind wants to say that the red patches on the ground are the remnants of that bright red flame retardant you can see dropped from planes during forest fires, though I can't really say why I believe this besides the fact that I saw bright red and then shortly after saw burn scars in the forest.

My retread of the first The Witcher book has been fun so far. This one is structured as a series of short stories with an overarching story that is cut up and interspersed between the other, more self-contained stories. It's been a fun read, I adore the monster-hunting fantasy that these books portray, wherein the research of the target and the prep for the fight is as much (or even more of) a part of the conflict with the monster than the actual fighting. I think, in fantasy in general, witchers are my favorite portrayal of a monster hunter, period. The politics in the series do get quite interesting, but for now what's fresh on my mind is the monster hunting fiction.