Have you tried RinkWorks?

Those of us who suffer from CTS(Cronic Travelers Syndrome) sometime find ourselves with time on our hands at home. It's not your fault. It just happens. So you cut the grass and clean the glass in the storm door. You might rearrange the stuff in the garage, or sweep last fall's leaves off the patio.

But sooner or later, you are going to get bored. You can't let that go on for very long. If you have been around for as many decades as I have, you know you have to keep busy. You have to keep exercising those brain cells.

I have found a good place to keep the brain cells working, and you can be there in about a minute. It's an internet site called RinkWorks. You will find games, humor, movie reviews that break the mold, good jokes, bad jokes, and bad, bad, bad,jokes. No, not that kind of bad. There is nothing on RinkWorks that would offend your grandmother. Even your grandchildren can wander around in this rather large site.

You might want to try the Dialectizer on RinkWorks. You type in a paragraph in plain English, and it gets converted to what ever dialect you choose.

There is a chatroom, and a forum. The forum has a "Reader Poll" with questions that vary from strange to ordinary.

This is the only site of it's kind that appeals to all age groups. When you leave The Seven Day Weekend, just type in www.rinkworks.com in that line up there where it says address. I've been surfing RinkWorks since sometime in the last century and I don't think I've seen it all yet.
Howard

scooter meets

One of my favorite trips is to go to a scooter meet. But the meets I attend are not like the Mods and Rockers over in England, and certainly not The Wild Bunch.

This is sort of like a social event where everybody has the same hobby. We all collect antique motor scooters. We sit around and talk about just about anything, and we also discuss old motor scooters. We enjoy good food, good company, and with some luck, good weather. We sometimes have musical entertainment, an auction, a banquet, a scooter show, and even a few rides. The average age of the people in attendence is about 55 or 60. A great many are retired.

The one I am going to this month is The Southeastern Cushman Club's Spring Scooter Week, which is held in the picturesque little Southern town of Cochran, Georgia. The meet is planned so that Cochran is in bloom. Half an hour to the north, the city of Macon is having a cherry blossom festival.

This meet is a family thing. Most bring their wives and some bring children. Almost everybody brings more than one scooter.

If you would like to learn more about this hobby, or see some scooter pictures, go to http://scooterplace.blogspot.com/ or look at the Southeastern Cushman Club's website at http://www.southeasterncushmanclub.com

Oh. That picture up there. The scooter in the foreground is one of mine. It's a 1953 Allstate, a scooter that was made by the Cushman company and sold by Sears.

Nobody is just passing through.

Some places are really at the end of the line. When you get there, that's as far as you can go. Towns like Key West, Florida, for example. Once you get to Key West, that's the end of the road. There is no passing through. Provincetown, on the tip of Cape Cod is like that. But it isn't always places surrounded by water. It can be mountains. I used to live in Neon, Kentucky, a long time ago and it was almost the end of the road. Lump together the towns of Neon, Fleming and McRoberts, and that is as far as you could go. Even the railroad stopped there. Neon had a triangle of railroads so trains could turn around to go back the other way. At least they did in 1948.

Can you think of any other end-of-the-road towns?

Cruising is always in season . . .

Cruising is a great vacation at any time of the year. In winter there is always the Carribean. The rest of the year, you can cruise just about anywhere. This year you can look for some real cruising bargains. I say that because the media is having a field day with stories about crime on cruise ships. Some people will turn to other types of vacations because of the bad publicity, and that will leave more cabins for the rest of us. When cruise lines see the possibility of sailing with a bunch of empty cabins, they start slashing prices.

I think the media is being unfair. Cruise ships are far safer than a vacation in a city. Think about the number of people who are on cruise ships at any given moment during the busy part of the cruise season. It's enough people to populate a fair sized city. The on-board crime rate is going to be way less than in that hypothetical city. Cities have all kinds of people. They have rich, poor, homeless, drug addicts, and criminals of every kind. The percentage people likely to commit crimes is far smaller on a cruise. Most crimes on cruises happen when somebody gets drunk and does something really stupid. Very few people get on a cruise planning a crime.

So how do you get in on this windfall of bargain cruises? Book late. You will have less choices if some ships sell out weeks before sailing, but with the current media induced hysteria, it is not likely to happen.

Work through a good travel agent. They know where the best deals are and can probably get you a better price than you will find online. But they also use their experience to help you dodge some of the pitfalls.

One horror story I've heard is about a woman who booked her own cruise and was left standing on the pier, because she didn't have a birth certificate or a passport. She was not aware that she needed one. Any travel agent worth his salt would have mentioned that. They can tell you what to take and what to leave home. Most travel agents have traveled enough to even give you first hand information about your destinations. And you don't pay the agent to book your cruise. The cruise line does.

So is there really crime on cruise ships? Not real often, but I suppose it happens sometimes. My personal experience is that it is rare. If I count correctly, I have been on 14 cruises of a week or more, and have never seen nor heard of a crime on board. I have never had anything stolen, and I have never been cheated. A cruise ship would not be a very good place for criminal activity, because there is no place to run.

So turn off that TV and let's go cruising.