Time for a vacation

That’s right, it’s time for the IT guy to finally unplug for a couple of days and take a trip with the wife.  This year, we’ve decided to take a trip to Pennsylvania.  It should be a great trip, here’s how it shapes up:

We’re leaving early morning Sunday and heading to Lancaster, PA for a couple days of shopping in the Lancaster Outlets and to check out the Amish country.  After that it’s off to the main reason for this whole trip, the Yuengling brewery in Pottsville, PA (I’ll expand more on this later.)  Next is a trip to Hershey to check out the Hershey factory and maybe see what it feels like to dive into a vat of chocolate (I’m sure OSHA won’t mind if we take a small dip ;))  Finally, if the weather holds out for us, we’re going to hit up Gettysburg, since the last time I went I was a little kid and Amy has never been, so that should be pretty interesting too.  As a recap, in the span of 5 days, we have: shopping, beer, chocolate, and history…what more could you want from a vacation?

Now, you may have heard that Yuengling is America's Oldest Brewery (yuengling.com).  Because of this, we have been told by reliable sources, that OSHA does not apply.  This means that instead of the normal brewery tour you go on where there is a 3” piece of bullet proof glass between you and the beer, you’re right there, on the line, within arms reach of the golden delicious nectar that they call Yuengling.  I’m not really sure why, but this really excites me.  It could have something to do with the fact that when we went on Jack Daniels tour we didn’t even get to see them making the liquor, instead all we saw were the old workshops and old methods of how bourbon used to be made.   It was pretty cool and really educational, but it just felt like something was missing.  I’m hoping this trip to Yuengling will help fill that missing feeling I had.

In case you’re wondering why we’re randomly taking a vacation to the northern United States in late October (not exactly your tropical oasis by any sense) I should probably mention that next week is my 30th birthday and the one thing I really wanted to do for my birthday was to check out the Yuengling brewery.  So, off we go for a week of fun and adventure Amy and Charlie style, it should be a really good time.

In case you’re wondering, the answer the burning question is no, the fact is not lost on me that next week will mark the release of Windows 7 (microsoft.com).  I am really excited and I can’t wait to get my hands on the final version (even though I’ve been using RTM pretty happily for the last couple of months.)  The one thing that I can’t figure out yet, is weather or not Microsoft is planning on shipping Windows 7 with XP mode already installed, or is it going to be something that you’ll have to know about and surf though the massive confusing website that is Microsoft’s website to try and download and install it…should be interesting to see. 

Oh yeah, on a somewhat amusing note, check out this article from Gizmodo related to their <sarcasm> love for the Blackberry Storm </sarcasm> Also, I read somewhere about the heavily rumored iPad from apple which now has an apparent ship date of early 2010…I’m feeling another massive keynote speech from Jobs at MacWorld…who’s with me?

Ok, that’s gonna be it for this one, more later on.

~C