1998 Vacation Part VII: More Tuesday including Planet Barfywood
9/21/1

written by Postwood, September, 1998

After we walked back to the car, we were mucho hungry. So we decided to go to Planet Hollywood, the restaurant / movie memorabilia museum which, by the propaganda going on the big screens there, is owned not only by Arnold, Bruce Willis, and Sylvester Stallone, but also Will Smith and some other folks.

It was raining big time when we got there. No one was in the place except for people who worked there. We got a good seat and we ordered our food. Aisai ordered the chicken fajitas and I ordered the steak fajitas. Or I tried to.

See, Texas, which is the best state in the US on many levels, has this little thing that they stick to called the truth. When Samuel Adams tried to market their Cream Stout in Texas, they had to rename it. Why? Because it isn't a stout beer by definition. So they renamed it Cream Stealth. This was one of those situations.

The waiter said "The beef fajitas?" and I said "Steak." Then I looked down at the menu and sure enough it said beef, not steak. So I said, "Yeah, beef."

The difference is that if you actually cut a cow up in pieces, some are considered steak and some ribs and some whatever. This meat was not from a place you can call steak during a business transaction in Texas.

I love Texas. And that beef was good too.

I really enjoyed the food. They gave us way too much and since we were about an hour away from the condo, we couldn't really take any home in a take home bag. Oh, sure we really could. But 30 minutes down the road it would turn into a "Sweat Loaf"� and we'd have to chuck it.

The term sweat loaf originates with a burrito that I couldn't eat at our ex-favorite Mexican restaurant, El Camino Real. I had gotten one of the combos and couldn't eat it all. So we got a take home foam box and put the soon to be offending burrito in it. We headed down University Drive going west and didn't make it past the Taco Bell on the hill before the sweat loaf struck. Feh! It was nauseating to have the smell of that burrito permeate the air. I'm sure it actually smelled quite nice, if you were hungry. But we were stuffed.

The reason that El Camino Real is our ex-favorite Mexican restaurant is because they served me that cartilage fin that chickens have in between their breast in my chicken quesadilla once. Also they changed cooks and required a percentage of the tips of the servers. So they are out in my book.

And we don't eat Domino's Pizza since they cooked a roach in our pizza and treated us rudely when we called to get them to take away the offending pizza and bring our check back.

But back to Galveston, or Houston, since we were eating at Planet Hollywood. The food made Aisai sick, even before we finished the meal. It cost a whopping $45 for two folks to eat fajitas there, and we don't drink alcohol.

Again it rained between the two cities. Once in Galveston, it wasn't raining. We decided before we got back to the condo to see where exactly where Seawolf Park was. We did this and then headed home.

Once back, I commented to Aisai that her mom might be fretting about us. I said this since I was watching the Weather Channel and they were making this out to be a big deal, which it soon would turn into, but wasn't quite up to strength yet.

Aisai called her mom. I don't know if this was before of after we found out that when we call using the calling card we don't get our 10 cents a minute, we get 45 cents a minute. So Aisai may have called her mom and then her mom called her back. I don't know. But they talked for about 30 minutes and I was right, Aisai's mom was very concerned about us.

Around this time the official tropical storm warning went into effect. It would be tropical storm Francis if it got up it's strength, which it was going to.

Since it was very windy and sprinkling, Aisai didn't want to go swimming. She just wanted to go down to the hot tub, which is under a lath, which for those of you who don't know, is like a lattice but the boards only go one way.

We did go and get in the hot tub and then a torrential downpour started. The rain was cold but the hot tub was nice and warm. We only stayed out for a while. Drying off was pointless until we got back inside.

I had to redact the paragraph that I had here. It said that we had Papa John's pizza, but that was on Wendesday. On this day, we had homemade pizza. See, we have that often at home. But the difference is at home we buy tomato sauce and have lots of spices at our disposal. Aisai also makes the crust by hand with the Kitchenaid.

This pizza was poopy. Since we didn't have the spices, we bought some pre-spiced stuff. Ooh, it was mediocre. Its mediocrity was so evident, it stood out. Extreme mediocrity. Absolutely nothing outstanding about the flavor. After a piece and a bite, I ditched it. Yek!

Then I wend down and borrowed the Houston phone books from the check in guy. We were looking for one of the cyber caf�s there in Houston. I wanted to check my email. There wasn't a section in the phonebook for that but under ISP's and also under restaurants the place Atomic Caf� was listed.

By the time we woke up the next morning, we had 7 to 15 foot waves.