Haole

We recently booked a trip to Hawaii to go to a friend's wedding. We've never been and it should be very interesting and a lot of fun. We are probably going to stay in a condo for the week leading up to the wedding and then move over to the Turtle Bay resort for the big event. It's two and a half months away and I'm already excited. I'm so haole, I don't even know I'm haole.

YYZ-DTW-GSO-ROA

I had an interesting trip home from Toronto yesterday. Normally, this is a pretty quick trip but yesterday we had thunderstorms over Roanoke and they had to take us to Greensboro to land and pick up more fuel. We were about 2 hours late which isn't too bad considering.

Rental

The other week at SFO, Hertz upgraded me from my usual boring midsize to something a bit more interesting - a 2011 Ford Mustang Convertible. Despite not being the higher end model, this car was a blast to drive and I really had to keep my eye on the speedometer, lest I find myself going way too fast. I took it up in the hills after a particularly frustrating day on the project I was doing and drove the heck out of it for 2 hours. The car handled very well and had enough get-up-and-go to keep you very entertained. After a beautiful drive through the redwoods, the day didn't seem so bad after all.

Lesson

I was flying to Toronto this afternoon and got hung up because the flight out of ROA had a mechanical issue (something was wrong with the door). Since I had a tight connection, I knew I would miss the original so I called the Delta service number to check to see if there was a later flight. There was and the rep on the phone said that if I missed my original I'd be re-booked on the later flight automatically. Fine.

We get on the plane and go. We arrive over an hour late and, as expected my original flight had already left. I went over to the kiosk, scanned my boarding pass in the machine that prints out a new one if you have a missed connection and was so confident that I was on the correct flight, I just started towards the gate. Halfway up the escalator, I actually look at the time and I was on the flight tomorrow morning. Idiots. So, I have to go back down the the customer service center and wait on line. While I'm waiting, I call the Delta service number again to see what happened. Turns out, the computer automatically pushed me to the next day and she was able to put me on the later flight today. I reprinted my boarding pass and all was good. 

I learned two valuable lessons: first, always call customer service if you run into a problem while in the airport. Second, you might have to do the first thing twice to get it right.

Hotels

I had some very divergent hotel experiences on my trip last week. I started out in a semi-basement room that should have had a round door in Moses Lake. From that I moved on to an insanely expensive Sheraton in Palo Alto that was huge and had a little patio area (pic from patio at left). To get a little closer to the airport, I moved to a cheaper room at The Palace in San Francisco (shows how ridiculous Palo Alto is).

Tix

I bought our tickets to the NCAA Men's Lacrosse Finals today from Ticketbastard (why isn't there an anti-trust case against those guys?) We are going to be at the field level in the end zone. Not as good as I would have liked, but it'll be fun.

Trouble Island

For such a small country, Iceland seems to be causing Europe (especially the UK) a lot of trouble these days. First, they spew toxic financial products and now volcanic ash shuts down air travel. Maybe we need to make some sacrifices to Odin or something.

Bags

An airline I'm not familiar with is planning on charging for carry-on bags. I'm OK with this idea. Charging for checked bags has had the predictable consequence of increasing the amount of carry on luggage. When I travel for business, I carry on for efficiencies sake and it is really annoying to not have enough room in the overheads because everyone is trying to save a buck or two. I don't blame the people, I blame the airlines for the pricing structure.

When I travel with my family, we will check bags and it is annoying to have to pay (if not on Delta where I'm a frequent flier). If you had to pay the same in either case, it would encourage people to do what makes the most sense for their travel plans and luggage requirements. If you really don't need any luggage, then you shouldn't have to pay for it.

Bonehead

I was in Philadelphia for a couple of days this week. I'm not quite home yet, being stuck in Dulles until at least 11:00 this evening waiting for the flight crew to show up.

Since I left for the airport at about 4 PM to make sure I made my 6:50 PM flight without a big hassle (ever tried to find a gas station near the Philadelphia Airport to refuel your rental car?), I basically could have driven home faster than flying. If I'd left at 4PM, I would probably be getting home at about 11:30 PM or so.

As it stands now, I may or may not make it home by midnight. Late flights like this tend to get canceled because the flight crews can only be on duty for so long and if they get signficantly delayed they sometimes can't fly.

Routing

I had a meeting in Alexandria, VA yesterday and used my wife's Garmin GPS to help navigate me to the hotel. It's a nice little system and works well, but the routing it took me on was very strange. By far, the most obvious route from Roanoke to Alexandria is I-81 to I-66. However, the Garmin routed I-81 to I-64 and then through the country to I-95 and then up to Alexandria. Since that seemed a little bit more interesting, I went with it.

The route features very nice bucolic scenery but there was one big problem. I had a rental car (a crappy little Kia Sportage) and I was about out of gas near Charlottesville. No problem - I'll hit the point of interest button on the Garmin and it'll find me the nearest gas station. It was only a couple of miles up but when I got there, they were out of gas. Hmm. I'm right at empty and in the middle of the country. The next closest station was a little out of my way, but I think I can make it there, so I turn off the main route and head towards the station. I'm on fumes when I pull up to this place where I was fully expecting Gomer Pyle to walk out and notice that they hand scrawled "Out" signs on two of their three pumps. Luckily, they have some left in the third and I get $20 worth (5 gallons) which is enough to get me to civilization. I guess those little hurricanes that blew through really did limit the amount of gasoline available.

Redeye

I'm done with the redeye. I flew from San Francisco to Atlanta and then to Wilmington, NC earlier this month, departing SFO at 10:25 PM PT and arriving ILM 9:44 AM ET. I had some trepedation about the flight beforehand because I was assigned seat 30D on the 767 from SFO to ATL. That is essentially in the middle of a row in a sea of humanity in a small aluminum tube. More or less a death sentence for enjoyment of the flight.

The flight was completely booked and nothing I did could get me out of that seat. I tried to upgrade using (worthless) points, but got denied. I tried calling. I tried the website every 4 hours. My persistence paid off and on my last try before I rebooked to Friday (cutting into my vacation), I hit the jackpot and grabbed an exit row aisle.

The flights were smooth and everything departed and arrived on time. I even got some sleep. But I felt like death warmed over the next day. Even after a nap, I was extremely tired and my legs were killing me. If I can't handle a flight in the best seat in the house outside of first, then I shouldn't be doing it. So, no more redeye for me.

Hiatus

I've been crushingly busy with work the past couple of weeks and we've been in our typical early summer busy mode which limits my extra energy for writing anything on this weblog. Just to keep it from gaining cobwebs, I'm writing this quick post.

Part of that early summer busy mode was the Bath County Triathlon. The race was a lot of fun. We did it as a family team with my wife swimming, me cycling and my daughter running and finished in a respectable time. The weather was absolutely perfect and we had fun at a friends post-race party at the family farm in the beautiful countryside. The only downer was that a friend came down from NYC to do the race and had to scratch due to a rib injury.

Uneventful

I took a business trip to Peoria, IL this past week and it was absolutely uneventful. Delta was on time both ways and the weather was cooperative. Pleasant, even. A very nice contrast to my last trip there.

The only mild surprise was how crowded the flights (all four were booked solid) and the Atlanta airport were. With all the recession talk and airlines cutting back like mad, I half-expected it to be a ghost town.

If I Can Make It There

Sometimes persistence pays off. I've entered the lottery for the NYC Marathon for the past three years (2005, 2006 and 2007) and not gotten in. For this race, the fourth time is a charm and they let you in automatically. So, I'm in.

I'm a little bit taken aback by the $166 race entry fee, but that is probably going to be a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of flights. A quick check today had flights from our local airport at $455. Ouch.

Smooth Sailing

I flew up to LaGuardia from Greensboro for a quick Thursday thru Saturday trip and the flights both ways were early. Flying generally sucks, but sometimes, it goes well and when it does, it is a very efficient way to travel.

The picture here is of one of the 4 Airbus A319s that used to belong to Airbus and are currently mothballed at Greensboro. They sure looked a lot nicer than the beat up Canadair CRJ that Delta flew us on.

Oh, Behave

If I'm going to rip TSA for their rediculous faux security, I should give them props when they do things that make some sense. This move to add more widespread behavior screening makes sense. There are still gaping holes in the system, but this is a step in the right direction. Frisking grandma makes no sense; stopping the 22-year old well dressed man who looks very nervous does.

Didn't Know Ya

I saw today that start-up airline Skybus is shutting down. They had a lot of flights out of Greensboro and I was thinking about trying them on a flight up to Connecticut later this month. The fact that the CEO quit to pursue a book authoring carreer shows how profitable the airline business is.

Rök on

My drive home from Philadelphia today was not bad. It's a long one, but I was listening to an interesting presentation on the Vikings by The Teaching Company. Pretty interesting stuff. I kind of thought they were just sort of primative barbarians who pillaged for a few hundred years and then started making Volvos. The real story is a bit more complex and interesting. I didn't finish the whole course on the drive, but my curiosity is piqued.

An interesting tidbit - men who died in battle and women who died in childbirth were thought to be treated as heros in the afterlife. If you died a peaceful death in old age, you were condemned to a less than pleasant afterlife.

Bad call

After my travel experience the other week and envisioning a similar outcome, I made the call to avoid the huge ice storm predicted on Friday and return from Indianapolis on Saturday morning instead. Turns out, the weather was not so bad and my flights today were basically on time (or at least within the one hour window that Delta considers on time). I can't win at this travel game.

I'll probably drive

I was recently looking into booking a business trip to Philadelphia. USAirways has the only direct flights from Roanoke, so I was looking at their prices for that trip. A round trip to Philadelphia with seven days of lead time would cost $740. If I were to fly the same schedule on the same airline to London, it would cost me $372. I know stupid airline pricing isn't exactly news, but that is absolutely insane.