Shop Outdoor Supplies

At Amazon, Shop Outdoor Recreation.

Also, Pools, Spas, and Supplies.

More, Coleman Sundome Tent.

And, Sleepingo Camping Sleeping Pad - Mat, (Large), Ultralight 14.5 OZ, Best Sleeping Pads for Backpacking, Hiking Air Mattress - Lightweight, Inflatable & Compact, Camp Sleep Pad.

Still more, Coghlan's Pop-Up Trash Can.

Plus, Vont 4 Pack LED Camping Lantern, LED Lantern, Suitable for Survival Kits for Hurricane, Emergency Light, Storm, Outages, Outdoor Portable Lanterns, Black, Collapsible, (Batteries Included).

Here's more, Wise Owl Outfitters Hammock Camping Double & Single with Tree Straps - USA Based Hammocks Brand Gear, Indoor Outdoor Backpacking Survival & Travel, Portable.

And, Military Outdoor Clothing Never Issued U.S. Military Canteen.

Finally, OFF! Deep Woods Insect Repellent VIII Dry, 4 oz. (2 ct).

BONUS: Dave Canterbury, Advanced Bushcraft: An Expert Field Guide to the Art of Wilderness Survival.

Vegas Vactioners Face 26-Mile Traffic Jam Back to California (VIDEO)

At the Review Journal, "Memorial Day traffic jams I-15 at California-Nevada border."

There were a few drunk drivers, but most of those busted were trying to make time on the emergency lanes. That's why my wife and I get on the freeway before 6:00am, to beat the rush back to Cali.

Heat Wave Coming

Well good --- folks need to get out to the beach.

At LAT:

Heat wave to arrive in Southern California just in time for Memorial Day https://t.co/ZPKHr2Ypll

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) May 22, 2020

Amazon Sales: Pools, Spas, and Supplies

*BUMPED.*

At least folks can swim in their own backyards during the lockdown, man.

At Amazon, Shopping for Pools, Spas, and Supplies.

Plus, Kaufman – 100% Cotton Velour Striped Beach & Pool Towel 4-Pack – 30in x 60in, and AmazonBasics Cabana Stripe Beach Towel - Pack of 2, Navy Blue.

Also, Outdoor Patio Synthetic Backyard Poolside Garden Black Rattan Wicker Chaise Lounge Chair Cushioned Set Adjustable with Armrest (Set of Two, Royal Blue), and Best Choice Products Adjustable Outdoor Steel Patio Chaise Lounge Chair for Patio, Poolside w/ 5 Positions, UV-Resistant Cushions - Beige.

More, SKINNY TUMBLERS 4 Colored Acrylic Tumblers with Lids and Straws | Skinny, 16oz Double Wall Clear Plastic Tumblers With FREE Straw Cleaner & Name Tags! (Clear, 4).

Still more, Coleman 24-Can Party Stacker Portable Cooler.

And, Fujifilm FinePix XP130 Waterproof Digital Camera w/16GB SD Card - Sky Blue.

Also, Banana Boat Sunscreen Ultra Sport Performance, Broad Spectrum Sunscreen Spray - SPF 30 - 6 Ounce Twin Pack.

BONUS: Sports Illustrated Swimsuit: 50 Years of Beautiful Hardcover.

Disneyland Manages Wait Times at the New Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge

Disney's now gone all woke with corporate social justice policies, and CEO Bob Igor's a fool.

But their crowd management techniques for the new attraction are definitely putting paying customers first. Everything's pricey, but heh, you gotta pay the price to feel nice.

At LAT, "Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge forces Disney to tap eons of crowd-control expertise":

Disneyland first wrestled with crowding on opening day in 1955 when restaurants ran out of food and drinks, lines formed at the bathrooms and visitors sneaked in with counterfeit tickets.

In the 1960s, Disneyland pioneered the use of stanchions and tape to create switchback queues for waiting visitors and provided entertainment to pass the time. The park took another swipe at the problem two decades ago, when it introduced “Fastpass,” the virtual queueing system.

But the opening this weekend of the biggest expansion in park history — the 14-acre Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge — pushed Walt Disney Co. to launch perhaps its most comprehensive crowd-easing effort yet, in effect acknowledging that the 18.7 million people estimated to have visited Disneyland last year is a record primed for breaking.

“It’s always been an area of work for us because we know intuitively that it does impact the experience,” said Kris Theiler, vice president of Disneyland Park. ”By coming at it from a comprehensive perspective, we’re able to make some really big impacts.”

On Friday, the first day that the expansion was opened to the public, the hard-core Star Wars fans for the most part moved about the $1-billion land with ease. But the lines to the only operating ride as well as the cantina and the most anticipated shops — attractions in their own right — fluctuated from brief to excruciatingly long.

Giovanni Peraza, a recent high school graduate from Chandler, Ariz., complained that he waited an hour to ride the interactive Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run. “It was too long,” he said.

But Karen Covington and her husband, Bill, from Del Mar said they were happily surprised that their wait for the ride was only 25 minutes.

“They are doing a good job of crowd control,” Bill Covington said.

“I hope it stays this way,” Karen added.

To keep crowds from creating gridlock, Star Wars employees directed parkgoers to move in a counterclockwise direction, starting at the Millennium Falcon ride and circling to the Middle Eastern styled marketplace.

About 90 minutes after the land opened, workers were seen putting black tape on the ground to create switchback lines near the opening of Savi’s Workshop, where visitors can build their own lightsaber. At about the same time, Oga’s Cantina, the space-themed pub, reached capacity and only allowed new entrants when the crowds thinned.

Disneyland executives, who stood by to assess the opening day, said they saw no surprises.

“It happened exactly as we thought it would,” said Josh D’Amaro, president of Disneyland Resort.

Anticipating an out-of-this-world demand for the fictional land, Disneyland required parkgoers to book a four-hour reservation period to visit the Star Wars expansion during the first three weeks. Visitors were given colored wristbands to identify those who were allowed in and those whose allotted four hours had run out.

When the reservation period for a Star Wars land visitor ended, the guest was not allowed to board an attraction or enter a shop and was told: “Your credentials have expired.”

The reservation system allowed the park to control how many people are in the Star Wars land at any given time. But even with such restrictions on guests, the wait time for the Millennium Falcon ride fluctuated Friday from 20 minutes to 70 minutes.

Disneyland is the second-most visited theme park in the world behind Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom in Florida, according to an annual attendance study by the Los Angeles consulting firm Aecom and Themed Entertainment Assn., a trade group for theme park designers and producers. Disneyland drew 18.7 million visitors last year while the Magic Kingdom hosted 20.9 million visitors, both up 2% from the year before.

Disney doesn’t release daily attendance figures, although longtime Walt Disney Imagineering art director Kim Irvine recently revealed that Disneyland attendance of 65,000 is a “normal” day. During holiday seasons, Disneyland has had to temporarily shut its gates from time to time when the park reached capacity, a ceiling that has never been publicly disclosed but some insiders have said is about 80,000 visitors.

Some industry experts say crowding worsened at Disneyland after the resort began in 2009 to offer monthly payment plans to make it easier for more visitors to afford annual passes.

Such passes range in price from $400 to $1,400.

To cope with the expected crowds during the 60th anniversary of the park in 2015, Disneyland opened up behind-the-scenes pathways to direct crowds around gridlock areas.

A year later, the theme park adopted a “demand pricing” policy that lowered admission ticket prices on a typically slow day — maybe a Wednesday in September — and increased prices on high-demand days. Disney portrayed the move as a crowd-management technique.

A study by the Los Angeles Times found that the queues at the park grew longer even after the dynamic pricing scheme was adopted.

In 2015, only three years after the Walt Disney Co. acquired Lucasfilm for $4 billion, the theme park announced plans for a $1-billion land based on the blockbuster Star Wars sci-fi franchise...

Still more.

Local Snow-Lovers' Delight (VIDEO)

It's been cold weather around here this last few days, and that's great new for local resorts.

At CBS News 2 Los Angeles:

Jennifer Delacruz Enjoying Summer

Following-up, "Jennifer Delacruz's Monday Forecast."

Well, since I've been lagging on my Ms. Jennifer blogging, here's a selfie from her weekend recreation activities. What a lady!

San Diego summertime ☀️🦀#SanDiegoWX pic.twitter.com/OUFub0pP7q

— Jennifer Delacruz (@10NewsJen) August 19, 2017

Schlitterbahn Water Park Update: 10-Year-Old Caleb Schwab 'Decapitated' by Attraction's 'Safety' Netting

Well, I guess we know what happened now.

Here's my previous entry, "10-Year-Old Caleb Schwab Killed at Schlitterbahn Water Park in Kansas City (UPDATED)."

And the update, at ABC News 7 Los Angeles, "GRUESOME DETAILS REVEALED IN BOY'S WATER SLIDE DEATH AT KANSAS PARK."

Just read it all at the link.

Apparently, the boy's brother witnessed the incident. I can't even...

10-Year-Old Caleb Schwab Killed at Schlitterbahn Water Park in Kansas City (UPDATED)

Well, there's just a tad more information out today than there was yesterday.

One person claims she saw the boy's "crumpled shorts or bathing suit" at the bottom of the water slide, as well as "blood on the white descending flume" of the structure.

If true, that rules out that the poor kid fell off the top of the structure, getting killed slamming to the ground.

Also, guests ride down the slide in rafts that require at least 400 pounds of passenger weight (apparently to keep the fucking thing from flying out of control off the damned thing.

But if the boy Caleb wasn't riding with two large adults, it's not possible that his raft met the weight requirements. May he flew out or was dragged down the slide?

In any case, at the Kansas City Star, "Questions swirl as grief falls over family of Caleb Schwab, 10-year-old killed at Schlitterbahn."

That slide doesn't look so safe, that's for sure.

UPDATED and BUMPED: At AP, "Police: Kansas boy suffered fatal neck injury on waterslide."

T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas

The Dixie Chicks played there last night.

It's right behind the New York New York Hotel, where there's now a new dining and entertainment promenade between that hotel and the Monte Carlo. (We vacationed in Las Vegas this last week. You might have seen a couple of my tweets at @AmPowerBlog.)

It's very impressive.

See Wikipedia for details.

The Great American Road Trip

Summertime and the livin' is easy, heh.

At the New York Times, "America Is Hitting the Road Again":

ON ROUTE 66 IN NEW MEXICO — Bob Pack forgot to bring his James Taylor CDs. Still, he and his brother and sister were having a blast, rolling among the sandstone mesas, ghost towns and kitschy tourist attractions.

They reminisced about family trips as children back in the 1950s, Mr. Pack and his sister, Joann, said, and not even their brother’s “annoying” habits of chewing tobacco and telling dirty jokes could ruin the drive. “I wanted to see West Texas one more time,” he said over breakfast at the Route 66 Casino Hotel.

Over in Arizona, Kay McNellen, a 23-year-old actress from San Diego, said she took to the highway almost every weekend these days, just to see how far she could drive. She has motored across the Mojave Desert, admired Sequoia National Forest and Instagrammed the Grand Canyon. “This is a better view than Netflix will give you,” she said.

The great American road trip is back.

It’s partly that gasoline this driving season is cheaper than it has been in 11 years, according to the AAA motor club, and that the reviving economy is making people more willing to part with their money. But there is more than that at play here. This may be a cultural shift, as Americans experiment with the notion that maybe money can, in fact, buy happiness, at least in the form of adventures and memories.

It is a change that appears to have taken root in the years since the 2008 financial crisis. “Postrecession, people are focused on memories that cannot be taken away from them, as opposed to tangible goods that expire and wear out,” said Sarah Quinlan, a marketing executive at MasterCard Advisors. “There’s a sense that you can take away my job, you can take away my home, but you can’t take away my memory.”

Whatever their motivation, Americans last year drove a record 3.15 trillion miles, according to the Department of Transportation, beating the previous mark, set in 2007. So far this year, both travel and gasoline consumption are up again.

The desire to get behind the wheel still comes as something of a surprise. The conventional wisdom was that driving mileage had probably peaked in 2007. The demographic bulge represented by the baby boomers is aging out of the driving years; people typically drive less as they hit retirement.

At the same time, millennials were not sharing the passion for the open road that previous generations of young adults had. Many, in fact, preferred to live in the nation’s downtowns, eschewing personal cars in favor of shared Ubers, or walking to their work and play.

But it turns out that both generations are driving more than anyone expected. “A lot of millennial behavior was really deferred assimilation,” said Steven E. Polzin, a transportation researcher at the University of South Florida. In other words, just like Mom and Dad, they were destined for a more traditional lifestyle — the marriage, the home, the garage — they just took a little longer to get there.

One such millennial is Jenna Bivone, a 29-year-old website and app designer, who two years ago left downtown Atlanta to live on the outskirts of the city with her boyfriend. “We used to walk everywhere, but the rents were too high and we wanted some land for my dog,” she said. “In a more suburban area we found good schools, stuff like that for future plans.”

Now she has a daily commute of at least a half-hour each way, and on weekends she and her boyfriend drive around Georgia and neighboring states looking for the best hiking. Over the last three years they have taken road trips in Wyoming and Colorado to hike in the national parks.

“When we travel we want to go to places we might never see again,” she said. “We’re not going to be young forever.”

Michael McNulty, a 67-year-old biotech executive from San Francisco, might not agree with the last part of her statement. Last year he bought a used Ford Airstream B-190 motor home on Craigslist for $13,000 as an experiment. He and his wife are enjoying the road trips, he said, and they are gradually extending their radius.

“The kids’ colleges are paid for, and they are out of the house,” he said. “We have been all over the world, and now we are seeing the U.S.A.”

Mr. McNulty did all the driving to the Grand Canyon for an extended weekend in April, and he prepared to drive all the way back home, 14 hours, in one day. The reason was simple, he said. “We’re going to go for it on Tuesday,” he said, smiling, “because I have to get back to work on Wednesday.”

The phenomenon is being further amplified by, of all things, a desire in some families for cross-generational adventures that harks back to a halcyon age of bundling everyone into the station wagon, counting license tags from faraway states, and mediating back-seat fights over who started the fight. Baby boomers, it seems, want to bond with their grandchildren on the road. Rental-car companies are reporting increased demand for bigger vehicles to accommodate the generations...

Still more at that top link.

Cruise Ship Crashes Into San Diego Pier (VIDEO)

It's a while-watching ship.

At the San Diego Union-Tribune, "Hornblower crashes into downtown pier."

Local Ski Resorts Going Blockbuster

Heh.

Reminds my of my younger days. We used to go skiing in the San Bernardino Mountains all the time.

This is going to be one of the best snow seasons in a long time, perhaps a decade or more.

Asheville, N.C.: The New, Hip Destination in the South?

I had no idea about Asheville when I visited a couple of years back, but I liked it.

And now here's this at WSJ, "Asheville: The South’s Insider Destination":

HENRY JAMES WASN’T much taken with Asheville, the small mountain town in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina. The novelist spent a week there in 1905 as a guest at Biltmore, George Vanderbilt’s 250-room French Renaissance home. “It is a strange gorgeous colossus,” he wrote to Edith Wharton, “in a vast void of desolation.”

But Mr. James is one of the few who’ve had an unkind word to say about Asheville, one of America’s oldest holiday towns. It was a favorite of the Gilded Age glitterati, including Ms. Wharton, who arrived at Biltmore not long after Mr. James and dispatched a more enthusiastic letter (referencing a popular painting of the day) about the “divine landscape, ‘under a roof of blue Ionian weather.’ ”

Staring out the window of my friend Hap Endler’s snug Cessna on an impromptu aerial tour of Asheville and the surrounding Blue Ridge Mountains, I found myself siding with Ms. Wharton. It was a pale blue September afternoon and we were flying over wave after wave of mountain tops covered in oak, maple and pine trees, a deep-green sea dappled in gold and red.

When we flew over Asheville, set squarely in the middle of the French Broad River Valley, I could see just a few tall buildings, most dating to the 1920s, sprout from the compact downtown. I could even make out the small, leafy squares where young buskers play their guitars and washboards on one corner, while a group of young homeless men panhandle for coffee on another. We were up too high to see the sign outside the Indian restaurant, Chai Pani, that reads “Namaste, Y’all,” but I knew that it was there: I’d seen it that morning on my way to the Early Girl Eatery, where a tattooed waiter in a cowboy shirt served me fried-green tomatoes over grits.

Hap and his wife, Julia Weatherford, live just outside of Asheville, in the town of Black Mountain. They’ve entertained me for years with stories about their colorful corner of Appalachia (where Julia, eager to dye her own yarn, bought a flock of sheep), but I had yet to see it for myself. Then, in September, Hap called to give me the latest. “Asheville is hopping. New breweries and restaurants are popping up like crazy and a bunch of hotels are under construction,” he said. Come on down. I’ll take you to President Obama’s favorite barbecue place.” How could I refuse?

Though the city and surrounding mountains have long been a top vacation destination for Southerners and have drawn luminaries from Albert Einstein to Willem de Kooning over the years, it’s only now starting to catch on with travelers outside of the South. A growing number of East and West Coasters are flying in to hike, fly fish and kayak and to lap up the beer (Asheville has 18 breweries and counting). They’re also coming for the restaurants, galleries and the music, all found in surprising abundance for a town smaller than Nantucket...

Hmm, maybe I'll plan a vacation out there with my wife. I stayed at the Grove Park Inn, which is quite famous, apparently.

Keep reading, in any case.

Disneyland Raises Annual Pass Prices (VIDEO)

When he was in high school, we bought our oldest son annual passes a couple of years in a row. They were about $400.00. Now the top-level pass is going for $1,000.00.

At the O.C. Register, "Disneyland raises annual pass prices, introduces $1,000 pass, and discontinues Premium pass."

Hundreds of Thousands in Las Vegas for Labor Day Weekend (VIDEO)

Wow. America's playground?

Sure looks like a lot of fun. I wish I could've made it out there with my family this weekend, but then I've been chilling pretty nice.

Maybe later.

At ABC News 13 Las Vegas:

Girl, 10, Dies After Losing Consciousness on Magic Mountain Roller Coaster

This is horrible!

At LAT:

Girl, 10, dies after losing consciousness after going on Revolution ride at Magic Mountain http://t.co/v5GNdFAfea

— L.A. Times: L.A. Now (@LANow) June 15, 2015

SeaWorld Shutting Down Sea Lion and Otter Show So Trainers Can Help Rescue Effort

At the San Diego Union-Tribune, "SeaWorld pauses sea lion shows."

Also at ABC-10 News San Diego, "SeaWorld Temporarily Shuts Down Popular Show."

'Orgasmic' Slingshot Ride Gets Women Really Excited

At Instapundit, "VIDEO: Women Get Really Excited, Orgasm On Amusement Park Ride."

Joan Jett at Harrah's Resort Southern California

Last night my wife and I caught Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, with opening band Night Ranger, at Harrah's Resort Southern California.

I tweeted a shot of our concert tickets.

I don't see a concert review yet, but she's as hot as ever, tight band, lots of energy and looking fabulous.

She was in the news earlier this week for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where she sang "Smells Like Teen Spirit" for Nirvana's introduction. See Hollywood Reporter, "Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Nirvana Joined by Joan Jett, Lorde; Dave Grohl and Courtney Love Hug It Out." Also at Rolling Stone, "Nirvana Reunite With Lorde, Joan Jett on Vocals for Rock Hall of Fame," and "The Inside Story of Nirvana's One-Night-Only Reunion."



PHOTO CREDIT: Harrah's Resort on Facebook.