| What I Did On My Weekend Vacation |
[Oct. 30th, 2005|04:00 pm] |
On Friday I decided that on Saturday I wanted to drive a couple of hours up north and visit Plattsburgh, near the Canadian border. There's a comic shop there called Fantastic PLanet (which I would link to if they had a website, but, they don't) that I visit once a year or so, and last year around this time my son and I drove up there, just us guys, and had a wonderful day. This time I decided to bring the whole gang.
I got everybody up at 7:30 AM and took 'em out to breakfast, then we made the long drive through the Adirondack mountain range, and saw as a bonus some spectacular scenery. Not so much the fall foliage, although there was a good bit of that -- but unexpected snowcapped mountains off in the distance made for a beautiful drive the entire way. It's not really snowed yet where we live, and it hadn't occurred to me that there'd be snow in the mountains -- duh -- but yeah, just beautiful to see the majestic Adirondacks covered in a frosty sheen of blinding white snow.
I had called Fantastic Planet on Friday to make sure they'd be open (and of course, this being comics, to make sure they still existed at all...!). It was a good thing, as I learned in that call that they had moved from their previous location last February. We didn't have too hard a time finding them at their new location (164 Boynton Avenue in Plattsburgh, check it out), which was much larger, brighter, and seemed to have an even wider selection of graphic novels. All back issues were 50 percent off, too, but I only found an issue of Duplex Planet that interested me enough to buy -- it had a one-pager by James Kochalka. Ended up spending just under one-hundred dollars in total, including $25.00 on a present, the newest Complete Peanuts volume for Aaron's 10th birthday next month. I finished my copy of this volume last week, and it's the first volume that sings as "real Peanuts" from start to finish. Aaron loves the strip, so this should be up his alley. He and I both also salivated at the mall Borders in Plattsburgh over the Complete Calvin and Hobbes books, set up in a nice display with one of the volumes on a pedestal to make you drool even more. On sale, but still 120.00. Didn't buy it...and now I don't need to, as when I told Chris Allen about my interest, he ordered it for me from Amazon at a steep discount and told me I could pay him back whenever. Ladies and gentlemen, he is either a very, very good friend, or perhaps drunk. Maybe both! But, thanks, Chris. This is a set I know I'll be sharing with my kids for years to come.
After lunch in Plattsburgh, we did something a bit out of character -- instead of hopping back on the interstate and heading home like the boring people we are, we took the ferry across Lake Champlain into Vermont, and went into Burlington, my first non-Kochalka visit to the city. It was supernaturally easy for us to find our way right where we wanted to go (the Church Street Marketplace), and Aaron and I browsed Crow Books (scene of last year's Kochalka concert and signing) and I found some neat artcomix, stuff by Matt Madden and others that I'd never seen in a comic shop before; ended up spending another 50 bucks on GNs including Sketchbook Diaries Vol. 4 for Aaron, which he picked out of their fairly impressive (understandably) Kochalka collection.
Also walked to the other end of their no-car open-air marketplace to hit the local comic shop, where I picked up the first two issues of the new Black Widow mini drawn by Sean Phillips and overpoweringly inked by Bill Sienkiewicz. Well, I should have KNOWN that would be the case...!
We got home about 8:15 PM, not even getting lost on the circuituous back-road route needed to get home from Vermont (taking the ferry back to Plattsburgh and driving down the interstate would have seemed a defeat, and also cost another 15 bucks), ordered a pizza, and went to
bed. Best day in a long, long time.
Tonight my wife is grilling chicken outdoors for dinner, and I rented The Shining (the Kubrick version) for us to all watch for Halloween. I haven't watched it all the way through since its original release, and am eager to see how the kids like it...and if they can handle it. The last time they tried to watch a Stephen King movie, Pet Sematary, they ran screaming from the room. So, we shall see... |
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