Last Thursday we got together with a bunch of our colleagues and went to Laser Quest in Akron to play laser tag. Laser tag is a game where you run around a foggy and dark maze shooting each other with lasers. I love this game. We had a total of fifteen people there, which was a little on the small side, but was still enough to make it feel festive and to make sure that you could actually find people in the maze.

We played a total of four games, and to my surprise, I did very well. Usually I start out very slowly and get better, but in the first game I came in second, behind LT, who grew up playing the game. Then, we played two team games, where the computer randomly assigns you a team, and I came in third and then first. That is the first time I have ever beaten LT! It was a good feeling. The last game was “normal” laser tag, where everyone is against everyone, and I came in second again. I’m not sure what I was doing differently from previous games, but I’m not going to argue.

I like the people with whom I work, and I am glad we had a chance to get together for a fun evening. Most (not all) of the people who came were mid-thirties and older; I guess it helps to be established in a career when you have to shell out $30 for an evening’s entertainment. This is the second time we have done the laser tag outing, and there are always people who come who surprise me and turn out to be a ton of fun. I’m hoping we can go again next spring (or maybe sooner!).

Sunday saw me getting dressed up in my suit for a shocking third time in three days: once for Matt and Clarice’s wedding, once for the CVCA auction, and then for our friends Matt and Lis. Matt and Lis’s son, Matt, was being baptized into the Catholic church, and they had invited us to be in the congregation. We are fond of Matt and Lis, and so we said yes, and I figured a suit was safe for a formal event. I’m glad I did; Matt and Lis had the service done in Latin, which added some formality to the already august occasion.

Matt and Lis now attend St. Sebastian’s church in Akron, which is a beautiful church. It is huge, and the altar area is a gigantic mural that is very beautiful. The church is decorated in a modern style, but with an eye to tradition, and so it is very tasteful and respectful.

There were probably about twenty-five people at the baptism, and the ceremony was beautiful. I could not understand the specific words because they were in Latin, but I was still glad to be there. At one point, the priest changed his robes; I assume that symbolized putting off the old spirit of this world and putting on the new spirit in Jesus Christ. That may be a wrong interpretation, but I liked it nonetheless.

Mer and I hung out in the church for a short time afterwards while Matt and Lis and the family were getting pictures taken. The church had the traditional Catholic church “Stations of the Cross” where pictures show thirteen different stages of Jesus’s progression to be crucified. These pictures were also murals, like the large mural up front, and they were very pretty. We got to chat with Matt for awhile, and then we headed to the car to  head over to Matt and Lis’s house for a small party that celebrated Matthew’s baptism and, slightly belatedly, the birthday of Matt and Lis’s daughter.

The party was in Mat and Lis’s ample family room, and there were again about twenty-five people there. I got a chance to chat with Matt more while I kept him company upstairs while he was waiting for the pizza to show up. Matt is very deep and knowledgeable, and I always enjoy talking with him. Once the food arrived, we headed back to the family room, and we ate and mingled. Mer and I got to meet Matt’s dad, who we had heard about but never actually met. He is a very nice man, and we got to hear a handful of stories from Matt’s growing-up years, including the fun-fact that Matt was a seventh grader at CVCA when Mer was a senior there. That required us to look up his photo in Mer’s yearbook when we got home, and there he was. Much fun.

We finished the party off by trying each of two different cakes, and Matt and I talked about doing another Matt-Lis-Matt-Meredith poetry study this summer. I’m leaning toward Donne, but it sounds as if Lis is a big George Herbert fan. Either way, time spent with Matt and Lis is time well spent.

Last Saturday, I started the day out with an 18.5 mile run. As with last week, Jim joined up with me partway through the run, which was very much appreciated. Not surprisingly, after I got home and showered and ate, I decided a nap was in order.

It was partly in order because I knew I’d be out late that night. Saturday was CVCA’s annual auction, and the organizers always want me to be there to make sure the computer check-out system is working. They also kindly let me bring Meredith, so it is as pleasant an evening as it can be considering that I end up worrying about computers for hours. The auction usually goes until 11:00 or so, so I figured a nap would help.

The auction has a theme every year – some years it has been Italy, or America, or the 1950s. This year, it was “An Evening in Paris.” The decorating people always do an amazing job, especially with the entry hallway, which this year was made to look like a street in Paris, with cafes and shops and such. They always deck the hallway out in pretty lights, and it is a good way to set the tone for the evening.

Supper is buffet-style, and usually tries to match the theme. Since I am not crazy about a lot of French food, I was happy to find excellent roast beef sandwiches, of which I ate too many.

Mer likes the auction as well. She usually does not like to shop, but the auction brings it out in her. Her best guess is that the factors of a good cause, competitive bidding, and bargains combine to bring out her inner shopper. She does have some ground rules; it is Meredith, after all. She only will bid on the opening bid of an item and will not bid past that. She still always ends up with some items, but she had fewer this year – I took it as a good sign that people were bidding more. She ended up with about half a dozen items, three of which were certificates for multiple sessions with personal trainers. She is going to be buff!

The auction went off without a hitch. I felt the live auction, where there is an actual auctioneer, dragged just a little. The live items tend to be big trips or a car or the like, and so the live auction often involves just a handful of bidders. Still, it is for a good cause (keeping CVCA tuition down), and dessert was served right before the live auction, so that helped pass the time for those of us who were not bidding.

So ended another CVCA auction; I think that was my ninth, and I have been blessed that we have never had a major computer issue in that time.

Last Friday, Mer and I left school early for a fun reason – our friends Matt and Clarice were getting married at 3:00. Clarice was in my Royal Fools improv group seven years ago, and so this was only the third student wedding that we had been able to attend (we missed one other because of a schedule conflict). What made this wedding particularly fun is that we have known Clarice for eight years and Matt for over two years (since he started dating Clarice). They are fun on their own, but they really shine as a couple.

Mer and I were a little anxious that they had a mid-March wedding, but we should not have been worried – it was a perfect day. It was sunny, and in the high 70s, and was just what a day for a wedding should be. Matt and Clarice had chosen to get married in a small building at the Hines Hill Conference Center, which sounds bland, but is a group of pretty stone buildings owned by the park service. The actual ceremony was on the second floor, in an open room with lots of exposed wood and a large fireplace. There were chairs for about forty guests, including a bunch of former CVCA students whom Mer and I were delighted to see again.

The ceremony was a fun reflection of Matt and Clarice. The pre-wedding music featured tunes from various movies like Star Wars and Jurassic Park, as well as other songs (like “Get Me to the Church on Time”), and Clarice walked in to music from the movie Willow. The wedding sermon referred to Clarice’s knowledge of wine and Matt and Clarice’s love of role-playing video games. Matt and Clarice’s wedding vows promised to love each other when they were proud of each other and when they were disappointed, which I thought was very wise – many times newly married couples fail to recognize that marriage can be hard.

The ceremony ended about ninety minuted before the reception so that there was time for wedding photos, but that was okay. Mer and I got to hang out with some of our former students, and it was a beautiful day out in a pretty place. Even once we left for the reception, Matt and Clarice had booked the library at the Sheraton hotel in Cuyahoga Falls as a pre-reception room with cheese and crackers and a small bar. Mer and I helped ourselves to a lot of cheese and crackers and visited with yet more people we had known from CVCA. Since the wedding had been at 3:00 and in a small venue, there were about twice as many people at the reception as had been at the wedding.

The wedding party arrived, and we shortly thereafter moved into the dining room for the evening. Dinner was served at the table, and was excellent. Mer found a stash of chocolates next to the coffee in the hallway, so she acquired some for us. Matt and Clarice had sat us at a table full of former CVCA students and one set of CVCA parents, so we were very comfortable there. Each table was identified by one of Matt and Clarice’s four cats, or by a duck or a guinea pig (Matt and Clarice like those animals). Each of the cat tables had a very cute picture of the cat in question, and we were seated at the Batesman table.

Matt and Clarice had their first dance before dinner, and then opened the floor up after dinner (and after they cut the cake!). Mer and I had grown tired of just sitting at wedding receptions because we did not know how to dance, so we started taking ballroom dance lessons about seven weeks ago. So, although we were by no means the smoothest dancers on the floor, we danced more than half the time. It made a fun evening into a great evening; we were able to join all of our fun-loving twenty-something friends on the dance floor without embarrassing ourselves, and that was happy.

Mer and I finally left at about 10:30, while the party was still fairly happening. I had a long run the next day, as well as the CVCA Auction in the evening, so we did not want to be out too late. Congratulations to Matt and Clarice!

One of my students, Ben, who is in Royal Fools, turned eighteen this week. His mother works for CVCA, and she and her husband thought it would be a great birthday celebration to invite all the men at CVCA who had a special relationship with Ben to go out to a surprise group dinner at Rockne’s (a local chain restaurant). I was free, and I greatly admire Ben, so I readily said yes.

What was really fun was that we had a Royal Fools practice Wednesday right before dinner, and so I saw Ben at practice and then again at supper forty minutes later. He was completely surprised, and it was a great time. There were about twenty of us there, and I like my colleagues, so I had a lot of fun. The food and fellowship were excellent, and I think Ben was pleased we were all there.

Lest you think Mer was ignored, I did buy her some soup (she likes Rockne’s soups) on the way out of the restaurant.

Last Tuesday, Mer and I headed up to Cleveland again for another education evening at Playhouse Square. The folks at Playhouse Square offer education sessions for selected plays. They bring in teachers, and feed them a simple but good meal (sandwiches, fruit, and many cookies), and give them background on the play they will see that evening, which is also for free. Playhouse Square treats teachers well.

Mer gets to go because she is an English teacher, and I get to go along because I coach an improv group, and so there is a theater tie-in there. This particular evening we were going to see the play Red, which is a play about the mid-twentieth-century artist Mark Rothko. While Rothko’s style evolved over the years, he is best known for colorful stripes on a solid-colored background.

The lecture we heard covered how Rothko’s style evolved from his early work, which was impressionistic but still resembled recognizable objects (like people), through early experiments in abstract art, to his full-blown style of color use with simple shapes. Rothko was trying to experiment with painting to see if he could elicit an emotional response from people by painting objects that had no real-world representation. Part of how he achieved this was in scale – most of his later works were huge, and he preferred them to be viewed very close up (eighteen inches or so). Rothko wanted the painting to take up the entire visual field of the viewer. The art lecturer also showed us some of the things that Rothko’s contemporaries were doing, so we could put his work in context. It was well done.

After the lecture, we went over to the theater for the public pre-show talk. The talk filled in some more background on Rothko, and was bold enough to ask the question, “What makes this art good?” as opposed to the response, “My five-year-old could have done that.” It basically boiled down to intentionality. Even abstract artists put thought and technique into their works, and so the work represents something the artist wishes to say. The young man giving the talk allowed that this was true whether the artist was famous or not. It made me feel better about the work that Rothko did.

The actual play, Red, was excellent. It covered a small portion of Rothko’s career, when he had been commissioned to paint a series of paintings for an upscale restaurant. At the time, it was the largest commission ever given to an artist ($35,000, or about $350,000 in today’s money). The set was fixed – it was a single large room where Rothko worked on his paintings, and there was a lot of open space for the two actors to work in.

The two actors played two characters – Rothko and a fictional assistant, Ken. Ken was a young artist who was hired by Rothko to help prepare canvases, mix paint, clean up, and so on. Ken’s function in the play was to act as a foil to Rothko, as someone for Rothko to interact with so that we could see and hear what Rothko was thinking and working on.

The young actor playing Ken did a fine job, although I felt his line delivery was too forced from time to time (he was occasionally too loud for the particular situation). The actor playing Rothko was jaw-droppingly masterful. He was not an actor on stage to me; he was Rotko. He was a huge stage presence.

The play ran about ninety minutes without intermission, and it never dragged. The actors actually did prepare a canvas by painting the entire canvas red, on stage, in about two minutes. It was very high-energy. The interaction between the towering presence of Rothko with his paid help was always gripping, even if Rothko sometimes abused his help terribly. Again, the set-up of the play was fictional, but it was historical fiction in that the play was extensively researched for nine months by the playwright.

All of this for free. Bravo, Playhouse Square!

Last Saturday was Mer’s day to be in charge, but she let me go running in the morning. I ran sixteen miles, about eleven of which were with my running partner Jim. So I had quite an appetite when I got home, which was good, because Mer was taking me out to lunch.

We went to the Hartville Kitchen, where we met up with Aunt Mary. Aunt Mary had just gotten back from a trip to Florida to see Mer’s parents, so we had a good amount to catch up on. The food at the Kitchen is always excellent, and they have wonderful chili that I had missed badly. In a rare moment of restraint, I skipped dessert after Mer told me we were going out later as well.

After lunch, we headed back to Aunt Mary’s place, and we all talked while I configured her new laptop. I like being able to visit while doing something useful. We left at about 4:00 and headed back home briefly.

Mer informed me that her dinner plans with someone had fallen through, so we could go anywhere I wanted to go. I had not been to the Old Whedon Grill (in Hudson) for awhile, so we went there, where we had the rather wonderful time of eating on the patio on a warm St. Patrick’s Day. That was pretty great. After supper, we walked over to Cold Stone Creamery to get some ice cream (for the second night in a row).

Mer then took me into Cuyahoga Falls, to a church, where we met up with Dubbs. We were there to see a musical called Tetelestai. Tetelestai is a Greek term that is translated “It is finished,” which is one of the last things that Jesus says on the cross before he dies. The musical was a Passion play, covering the end of Jesus’ life and his resurrection. One of our students had a small role in the play, which is how we knew about it, and I was excited that Mer had remembered to see it.

The play was quite good. The huge (seventy-plus) cast of people were all volunteers. The actors playing Jesus and Caiaphas (the High Priest of the temple) and Judas were all excellent. The play covered all the major events that happened to Jesus while he was in Jerusalem, and did a good job of interpreting the text.

The music was piped in, probably from a computer. It was well done, if a little dated-sounding at times. Tetelestai was written in the 70s, so a few songs sounded very 70s-ish, with prominent bass guitar riffs. While not bad at all, it could be a bit distracting at times, such as when Jesus was on the cross, and the music was causing the teens in front of me to dance in their seats and laugh. I don’t think that was the effect the producers were going for.

Speaking of the crucifixion, the play did a very realistic and gory portrayal of the act. Even in a play, the act of crucifixion was brutal, and really drove home the reality of how much Jesus suffered while he was dying. Happily, Tetelestai carried on through the resurrection, which shows like Godspell and Jesus Christ, Superstar gloss over or ignore.

There was a social time after the play. Dubbs had to leave, but Mer and I got to visit with a couple of students and their parents, and there were cookies. Mer had planned a food-filled day, but there was nothing wrong with that!

Last Friday, we had our second Fools’ show of the year. It was fairly late this year, but the schedule depends on when the auditorium/chapel is available, and so we had a mid-March show. Fourteen of fifteen Fools were able to make it, so we had a pretty full stage.

The audience was perfect – they were high-energy and really “into” the show. They laughed a lot, and they gave us good suggestions, and we had a fair number of audience members join us on stage for the last game (a game for which we traditionally allow audience members to come up and join us). It is really easy to perform in front of an audience like that. I’d guess we had somewhere between eighty and ninety people in the auditorium, but the size does not matter when they are pulling for you as this audience was.

We had a really good show. For the most part, the students followed the guidelines of improv and of the individual games. There were great moments on stage, and I was able to play in four games myself (normally I’m only in two or three). It was a fun evening.

Some of the things featured on stage were:

– An art show displaying new-found works by Picasso
– An answering machine full of messages from the aardvark king demanding cheese curls
– A platypus detective trying to find chocolate
– A game of questions inspired by bananas
– A game of musical chairs in which a lifeguard saves a kid from drowning, only to slip up and get fired
– A criminal who was helped by Mr. Gurnish (a teacher) in Mordor
– A future husband and wife going shopping for a cheap wedding dress
– A debate about the pros and cons of garbage disposals
– Two chefs battling it out for the best cookie dough

We had more skits as well. The evening went well, and we had lots of positive feedback. After the show, Mer and I went out to Cold Stone Creamery for dessert with the Churchills, which is a post-show tradition. We had not seen Zach and Londa for a few weeks, so we had a good time together (except I started having contact problems at Cold Stone, so I spent ten minutes in the bathroom trying to fish one out). It was a great show and a fun evening.

We slept very well, and went down to breakfast at 9:00. When I asked for hot chocolate, not only did they have it, and not only was it excellent, but they brought me a little cup of marshmallows, and a two-cup pot of hot chocolate. Bliss.

We got a table next to the wood-burning fireplace, which kept Mer warm and cozy. We had an excellent breakfast of yogurt, bread, and an egg-based casserole. After breakfast, Mer wanted to take advantage of the in-room whirlpool bath, so we did, and then I packed while Mer got ready for the day. Checkout was at 11:00, and as I loaded the car, there were a fair number of young women about the place. We asked about it, and the B and B owners told us they were having a bridal magazine photo shoot on the grounds, and later they were having a separate photo shoot in our room for lingerie. Later, when I suggested to Mer that the photo people might need a handsome man in the background, she smacked me.

The B and B owners were very gracious and took our picture in a few places around the grounds, and then encouraged us to wander the grounds, which we did for a short time. We wanted to make sure we had some more time in Frederick, so we did not linger too long. We got back into Frederick at about 12:30, and we wandered the canal area again to see it in the daylight. At one end of the canal is a community art center, which the B and B owners had recommended, so we checked it out. It was small but well done, displaying the works of area students, many of which were very good.

We wandered back along the canal, heading toward the park where we planned to eat our chocolates from the day before. There is a paved walking path along all of the canal (at least the parts we saw), so it was an easy and pleasant walk. It turns out that Frederick was the setting for a Civil War poem by John Greenleaf Whittier, entitled “Barbara Frietchie.” The poem was about a local woman who waved the Union flag as Confederate soldiers came though the town, and she told them to shoot her before her flag, and the soldiers left her alone. Mer remembered two lines from the poem:  “‘Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, / But spare your country’s flag,’ she said.”  So, it was a nice surprise to follow the canal and come upon Barbara Fritchie’s house and an informational placard about her and the poem. Mer felt vindicated that her memory had served her well.

We made it to the park, where we sat and ate B and B cookies and the chocolates we had bought. The sun was out, and it was in the low 60s; the daffodils were starting to bloom, and people were playing with their kids in the park. It was a wonderfully relaxing spot. After our snack, we wandered though the town some more, before heading back to the church to see a 2:00 matinee performance of Much Ado About Nothing.

Much Ado might be my favorite comedy; it is certainly the one with which I am most familiar. We got our same front-row seats that we’d had the evening before. One of the joys of repertory theater is getting to see the same actors in different roles. Again, the acting was excellent, and the comedy was spot-on.

Since Mer and I know this play pretty well, we got a chance to see how the limited rehearsal times lend to the energy of the play. There were a few times when I knew lines had been missed or spoken out of turn, but the actors covered for each other, and that was fascinating to see.

After the play, the actors had a talk-back, so we got to ask some questions about the process of staging plays like this. The actors admitted it was terrifying at times, but they loved that they could trust each other to help each other on stage, and they loved the energy and spontaneity of the plays. I was very impressed by the work they were doing, and I hope to get Mer back to Frederick again next year.

We left Frederick a little after 5:00, and so we got home at about 11:00, with a stop at a Perkins for a late supper. I’m afraid I was a wimp and went home from work at 11:00 a.m. on Monday to sleep. I was never good at getting by on short sleep, and that has not improved with age. Mer was a trooper and taught all day and stayed up until 9:00 Monday night. It was a whirlwind weekend, but a wildly winning one.

On Saturday, I pulled off a huge surprise for Meredith, which was more spectacular for my having thrown it together in about twenty-four hours.

On Friday, I was looking for “Shakespeare Festivals” on the internet, and I ran across the Maryland Shakespeare Festival, which is going on now through April 1st. The reviews I had found focused on MSF’s take on Shakespeare, which caught my eye. MSF tries to explore Shakespeare by recreating, as best they can, the conditions that Shakespeare’s actors would have encountered. Since theater was a primary form of entertainment in the late 1500s, plays had to be produced quickly, and theaters usually performed plays in repertoire (with several shows alternating during a limited time frame). So, Maryland Shakespeare decided to try to emulate that by having four plays in rep, and by staging the plays for the first time after only three days of rehearsal. They use no sets, and they perform in the same space in which the audience sits, and with the lights up so that they can interact with the audience. It sounded intimate and pretty unique, so the more I though about it, the more I wanted to see it. Since Saturday was “my day,” I asked Mer if she had plans for Sunday. When she said she did not have specific plans, I got busy getting tickets and finding a B and B in which to stay. Having done all of that, I told Mer she needed to be ready to go with an overnight bag by 9:00 a.m. on Saturday. She was intrigued.

We had a cool but pretty day for travel. I programmed the GPS to get us to the B and B, which was near Frederick, MD, about a five-hour drive away. Mer heard the GPS announce that there were “toll charges.” Since our local toll road is Route 80, an east-west road about fifteen miles north of our house, she boldly declared that she now knew we were not going south. That made me smile.

Mer was guessing our destination based on road signs as we headed east, passed the Pittsburgh area, and stopped to eat lunch at a diner around 12:30. She was mystified that we had already been traveling for over three hours and were not yet at our destination. She did not think I would go more than two or three hours afield on a normal weekend. We had a great lunch, including splitting a huge piece of “gob cake,” which was like a large slice of whoopie pie. We got back in the car and continued on.

I was quite gratified, and gave Mer some gentle grief, as we hit the Pennsylvania-Maryland state line. I think Mer’s reaction was, “No way! Maryland? Really?” It was fun. We continued on without incident to the B and B, which was a gorgeous place called Stone Manor. We got there at about 3:00, got checked in and unpacked, and got freshened up for the evening. I wanted to get into the town of Frederick at around 5:00 so that we had time to eat a leisurely dinner before the 8:00 show (about which Mer knew nothing). Mer still had no idea of why we were so far from home, even if it was pretty.

We went into Frederick, about fifteen minutes away, and I actually found a parking spot right next to the church where the play was taking place. Happily, there was so much to see that Mer missed the small signs advertising the plays. We walked a block to the main north-south shopping/restaurant district, and proceeded to The Brewery for supper. We got there just as they were opening up the upstairs dining area, so we had that to ourselves for about ten minutes. They were playing upbeat swing music over the speakers in the restaurant, so Mer and I took advantage to dance to one song until more people came along to the upstairs. I choose The Brewery based on its menu, which had a lot of comfort food on it, but it was a pretty restaurant as well, with a high ceiling, wood floor, big windows that overlooked the main street, and old letters from the 1800s as framed decor. I was impressed.

We left the restaurant at about 6:00, and I was glad we had gotten there at about 5:00 – there was quite a wait at 6:00. We still had about ninety minutes to wander, so we wandered the shopping district; I thought (mistakenly, as it turned out) I needed a toothbrush and toothpaste, so it gave us a reason to look at the shops. Along the way, we found a shallow canal that runs through Frederick, and that has been turned into the centerpiece of a stunningly pretty park and walking area. Near the downtown, the canal area is all bricked in and has four pedestrian-only bridges of different and interesting designs. It was well lit and romantic, with discreet lighting. We were both charmed and walked the length of the bricked-in area. We practically had it to ourselves since it was in the upper 30s and few people were out strolling. After I found and bought my supplies, we continued to wander the town. We found a chocolate specialty shop that was run by an ex-professor of foreign languages. He liked making chocolates better. I bought some chocolates for us for the next day, and we wandered some residential streets, impressed by the cute houses and apartments we could see. We walked to a nearby park and walked around the carillon in the park, and then went back to the car to stash our wares.

We got to the church at about 7:25, and the doors to the performance opened at 7:30. The ticket sellers were affable and chatty, and I liked them immediately. When the doors did open, Mer and I got front-row seats. On the way into the church, I had explained what was going on, and Mer was curious and excited to see the play. Saturday’s performance was the Maryland Shakespeare Festival’s premiere of All’s Well That End’s Well.

All’s Well is a comedy, but has some darker moments. The heroine of the play is a great character whom the audience loves. She loves a young man above her social circle. She cures the king of France of a disease, and as a reward he marries the woman to the young man she loves. He scorns her and runs off to wars in Italy, where he quickly lusts after another woman. Through cleaver tricks arranged by the young heroine, everything turns out well in the end.

The experience was pretty great. The play may not have been perfectly polished from a text point of view – there were occasional times when actors would start to talk over each other, and there were a few repeated lines, but as a piece of theater it was magnificent. The play was fresh to the actors, and they engaged the audience well, including occasionally interacting with us. Add to that the fact that I have never read, and only once seen, All’s Well That Ends Well, and it was engaging theater.

It was uniformly well acted. The lead heroine was very well cast, as she captured my sympathies right away. The king of France had a wonderfully deep voice, and the comic figures of the play were not afraid to play up the physical humor the play allows. Mer and I both enjoyed the evening immensely.

Which was good, considering it took us five hours to get there.