caymans health crisis.

at laguardia, around 5am on wednesday. when you're making a 6am flight, you need any fuel you can get. and that includes a breakfast sandwich from burger king.

unfortunately, totally confused by bk's menu, i somehow managed to order a value meal that had two 'croissandwiches.' (i mean, really.) to me, it seemed clear that i was traveling alone. i think the woman at the counter should have warned me that i was ordering two of these extremely bad boys. by the time i finished staging this photo, the cheese had congealed.
and my flight had left.
and i was the father of a small boy named peebo.

ah, the early morning, bleary-eyed flight.

in the atlanta airport - the full name is hartsfield-jackson atlanta international airport expeealidocius. i discovered you can buy the ny post there, for $1.75! take a wild guess as to what i thought of that. ok, i'll tell you. id rather swallow seven quarters, risking a choking death in the process, just for the minimal nutritional value therein, than pay $1.75 for that paper.
needless to say, i bought five.

in ann arbor, the caribou coffee is now a starbucks. but in hartsfield-bliggity-blah, caribou lives on!

in addition to roughly 30 terminals which you had to go between via a train-shuttle which i think terminated at west 4th, hartsfield had all these wacky art display cases. i genuinely enjoyed them.

and again.

my hotel room for wednesday night, at the marriot (resort, not 'courtyard by marriot'; there's one of those there too) in grand cayman island. this room would have been perfect were it not for the fact that it was on the ground floor, smack next to the path to the beach. so people were walking by every five seconds, meaning i had to draw the curtain the whole time. in my formative years, i used to get dressed and undressed in front of an open window, to possibly fulfill some twelve-year old girl's fantasy. but those days are long gone.

this coffee was in my room, though. pretty classy.

the marriot which wasn't a 'courtyard by marriot' ironically had a courtyard. (whom it was by was anybody's guess.) and in that courtyard, a little fountain/shallow pool, and living therein, this turtle.
i named him peebo, after my son.

twas an overcast afternoon on wednesday. but the beach still seemed paradisical. and the air was a bit humid, but overall warm, balmy and quite nice.

this is a picture of the tide pulling back, over my feet. i hadnt been in the ocean in over four years. god that felt good.

'08. nuff said.

wed. night, at dinner, at a place called 'calypso grill,' with the two photographers i worked with on the 'access' mag story. on the left, jason, from nyc and pittsburgh (long story); on the right, daniel, from the uk. both 39, both live in ny. i spent most of my time with them. we got along famously. id say they took me under their wing, but a more apropos analogy would be that it was like i was rushing their frat. anyway, great guys.

for dessert that night we got the sticky toffee pudding, chocolate bread pudding, and rhubarb crumble, and possibly the cheesecake - im not quite sure. when you're gonna be expensing everything, you do a lot of chowing. the togs introduced me to this concept pretty quickly, and i really took to it.

thurs. morning's breakfast was much better than the day before, in the airport. you got yer runny scrambled eggs with gravlax and a shmear on toasted seven-grain, a little watermelon. oh yeah - it was around this time that i noticed a scratchy tickle in my throat.

my room for thurs., fri. and sat. at the westin. fortunately, on the fourth floor. unfortunately, air-conditioned as if i were not a man, but a slab of beef. and i could turn it down, but there were basically two settings - freezing cold or humid and stodgy, so obv. i chose the former. as i developed more of a sore throat and overall congestion during the next few days, this led to being petrified of going back to my own hotel room, fearful of the cold therein. (i have now used the word 'therein' fifty times. i realize that.) going back and forth between the heat and the freeze was a bit much for me, and my complaining about it had jason calling me woody right quick.

my bathing suit. it had been unused for a long time, and one side of the drawstring was disappeared within the lining. this was untenable, b/c the trunks were loose on me, and any sort of swimming would have quickly revealed more of me than id care to share.
thankfully, at some pt in my life, i dont remember when, someone taught me how to rectify the situation. you tie a needle (or in this case, tweezers) to one end of the string, then thread the whole thing through the lining again. it took me about 30 min. to do this, so i was pretty proud of myself by the time i was done.

the beach by the westin. (just half a mile from the marriot) still overcast, on thurs. afternoon. but the air, and the water, felt great. i really cant remember ocean water being such a perfect temperature.

jason and daniel like to put on a reverse minstrel show the day before a big shoot.

like the corona commercials. kinda.

i went para-sailing! not.

the view from my westin balcony, early thurs. evening.

the monopoly money they use down there. and it's actually worth more than our greenbacks. :/ (it was like 1 'ci' buck equaled 75 american cents).

our set-up for the interviews/shoot, in a conference room in the westin, on friday morning. most of these were supposed to go down on thurs., but players werent making their flights, and everything, on the nfl's side, was fairly disorganized. so it ended up all happening friday. but i did get to interview c. johnson, a. smith, m. vick, b. leftwich, and b. edwards (go blue!). and they were all nice, and sometimes actually pretty interesting. obv i could go into great detail about all of this but im not gonna.

vick and me. i mean, really.

we did three of the players friday morning, then had a long break. we walked outside the conference room and were greeted by this. total perfection.

and with the adrenaline from the interviews (not to mention some aleve) overriding my throat, i felt born again.

so we went on a snorkeling excursion, via motorized sailboat. i only had my camera phone then. the sail was massive, and this song was running through my dome the whole time.

the actual day of the quarterback challenge, sat. vip passes dangling from our necks.

i snapped this from the vip area. by sat. morning, i felt like i had a full-on cold. not so much the sore throat, but my head felt like it was filled with more fluid than...one of those clown heads you shoot water into at a carnival?...the kool-aid man?...nicole kidman's face? (reaching, i know)
anyway, i was on some medicine that made me pretty drowsy, so this woman sees me and is like 'long night?' and i explain the situation, and we get to talking...she was vick's girl. at least one of them.

a. smith. he was very classy btw.

as a kid, i actually watched many of these challenges on the idiot box. at one pt, the qb's have to throw a ball at a moving target. i always thought the targets were mechanized.
they're not.
imagine having this guy's job.

yeah, nfl players are pretty ripped.

jason practices safe photography.

as does daniel.

view of the back of the westin, sat. afternoon.
tough life.

this was propped against the restaurant 'champion house.' it says 'yes we are still open,' as i mentioned in the preceeding post.
quick story. on the last night, we ask the locals where a good place to eat local food would be. they say 'champion house.' so sat. night, a cab takes us to a place called 'champion house II.' we ask our waiter what happened to 'I' and he tells us it's next door. 'what's the difference?' 'well, there they only have local food. here we have local and international.' so we tell him we want to go to the original. but peering in the window of the original champion house, it looks desolate and not good (no one was even dining there). so we decide to ask some dudes who were just chilling across the street if champion house is any good. they tell us yes. so we go back in, only to find out that the place was empty b/c 'I' is only serving take-out at the moment. so ten min. later, we end up right back at 'II.' you had to be there.

champion house II (the food was good, btw) had these battery-powered candles at the tables, which were a big hit.

walking back to the westin that night, we passed a kfc, replete with colonel sanders sitting outside.

hilarity ensued.

some bakery we passed. i liked the logo.

touching down back in atl.

oh, airport.


THE END.

as a bonus, here's a photo of my sis and m. batali from the event sat. night: