So I went to bed as soon as it got dark last night and slept for 14 hours. The fact that I can still get away with this indicates to me that it's okay to keep taking redeye flights if it saves me some money. The loose outline of my trip is this
- Get to Portland late at night Friday and go out for beers with Sara and Steve. Marvel in that yokelly way how great it is to go out for beers at 11 pm and have a GOOD BEER. Crash out. - Go out for brunch at the Vita Cafe and have corncakes and bacon with real maple syrup. Drink more coffee than is good for me. Yammer on about maple syrup and tastiness of same back home. Ogle all the great tattoos. - Wandered around the Saturday Market and some junk shops. Started in with my tired "you know this is the sort of thing that everyone has in their barns back home and here they sell it to you for $50" spil. My friends are very nice to ignore this. - Checked in to crazy hotel where the gal at the desk asked me "Oh are you part of the Arizona Wests, they're a wealthy rancher family..." I felt like I let her down a bit when I said no. Despite this, the rooms were nice. Fancy hotel but still, free Internet and coffee. - Dinner with Josh and Angela at Bush Garden. Very nice chill time before the crazy party. - Crazy party. - Planning meeting with MeFi heads of State at a suitably late hour the next day. TravelFilter launches this week sometime. It will be fun. - Got in touch with my friend Lisa DeGrace and spent a few hours helping her prepare for her Sundance Ceremony and also getting coffee and shopping for toilets. - I got a haircut at Rudy's. It looks great. For future reference, my barber told me that the cut I like is a "Graduated A-line Bob" Good. - Hangout time with Steve and Sara including Lebanese food that was totally OMG tasty. Stayed up too late. - Chill out day the next day. Then walk around time checking out the library. Then dinner time with Steve and Sara and Hiram and Melissa (two new MeFi friends) including some excellent dessert and the movie Valley Girl projected on to the back wall of the dessert place. - Dropped at airport, redeye home, work and doctor's appointment, then bedtime.
Got back last night. The wedding was great. The train ride back from New York City was relaxing and lovely, watching the sun set over the Hudson River Valley. My train car was full of (I think) teenaged musicians going to some sort of summer music thing at Killington so all the luggage space was full of cellos and guitars and other large instruments. I got to spend the time captioning my photos from the trip and staring out the window, letting my voice recover. I managed to lose my voice sometime on Friday before all the festivities thanks to some sort of a summer cold, so while I had a great time hanging out with some of my favorite people -- both at the wedding and also in Park Slope at my friends' place -- I did a lot of croaking and heard a lot of "you sound like Kathleen Turner" and "that must hurt." Actually, my throat felt fine, it just functioned poorly, so having some time to rest it was great.
The longer I stay in Vermont, the more I'm a gawking slack-jawed tourist when I'm in the city. Look at these PEOPLE. Look how TALL that BUILDING is. I got to do a lot of late night subway riding. Look how LATE these people are AWAKE. I had tacos out in Redhook while watching a soccer game. OMG how TASTY is this food?! I paid equal amounts for a taxi ride and a fancy cocktail. Twelve DOLLARS. I got to hang out with ten friends at once and it wasn't even a holiday. It sure was fun.
Then I got in my (unlocked all weekend - you know how this part goes) car to drive home from the train station. When I was just a few miles from home, driving along a road (yes it's called notown, I know I know) that is bordered on one side by a river and one side by a pretty steep hill. I saw what I thougth was a horse in the road and slammed on the brakes, skidded a little and came to a stop next to a moose. We regarded each other for a while in the light of my headlights on the totally-abandoned-at-10-pm route 107 and then he trundled off. I've never been that close to a moose in my life.
I got home and my house smelled funny. After ruling out the usual suspects (trash, compost, dead animal in wall, mold, tray under fridge, leaving cereal bowl wiht milk out) I went down to the basement where I found out one of the windows was out of its frame. The basement was damper than usual, so damp that the dead spiders in their webs in the ceiling were growing a thin coating of moldy fuzz. Gross! I turned on the dehumidifier and headed off to bed only to be awakened by a different smell a few hours later that could only be the result of a skunk fight. I talked to my neighbor this morning and we discussed whether or not to call the trapper. I finally put the screens in the last windows that didn't have them and I am airing the hell out of this place. I hope it helps.
I haven't done the city/country back and forth thing in about four years now. Seattle is really seeming far to me (though I'll be there next month for, you guessed it, a wedding!) but I could really deal with some regular city time like this. I'll have to see what I can scheme up.
Some neat things have happened in the lives of my friends and family, while I've been gallivanting around.
- My lawyer friend Kelly got pissed off at what she thought was a spurious lawsuit and filed a press release when the case was finally dismissed (before it went to trial but after a jury had been empanelled). It hit the AP wire. Way to go Kelly! - My uncle just had his lay ordination ceremony at the Vimala Sangha in Marin. - My friend Stepahie who I stayed with in New Hampshire a few nights ago is going to be the new library director in Stowe Vermont, I'm happy for her and happy to have her and her family back in Vermont
I got home from New Hampshire this afternoon to see the DHL guy just pulling in to my driveway. He had a package for me, from Kyrgyzstan! A pal I know from MetaFilter works in Kyrgyzstan. I asked him to send me some stuff a few months back. Today it arrived. The package had a few postcards, a letter, a satchel made from some old rugs and a neat felt hat. The hat and the bag smell amazing, like woodsmoke and trees from other places. I'll put up a photo at some point, but my camera is out of batteries until I replace the charger that went missing from my bag in Puerto Rico. I did manage to take a few photos in New Hampshire with my old crappy camera. I'm back from the road and have no more travelling work for several months, just weddings and visiting and whatever comes to pass. I already have the fidgets but I think they'll smooth out over time.
Yesterday was deemed "one of the country's worst days this year for air travel." And hey check me out, I made it home! Well, I made it home this morning actually at a time which is late in my world but not obscene. I had a good time in Ann Arbor and even a decent time in the Detroit airport where I was waiting, loaded on to the plane, loaded off the plane, delayed and finally transported home where we had to stay in a holding pattern over Burlington waiting for the wind to die down. By the time I got back, the Thrifty lot place where my car was had closed. Thanks to my cellular telemophone I had arranged with the guys to leave my car in their parking lot, key under the floormat. I got a ride to it from a guy on my flight. I drove home on an empty foggy highway which was lit mostly by the moon. I pulled into my driveway as the church bell struck three, noticed that someone had mowed my lawn while I was away, and went immediately to bed.
I talk a lot about places I travel as not really being my idea of a fantasy. I got home and got out of the car and heard the river rushing behind the house and the peepers making all of their noises and saw the freaky looking moon hanging over the neighbors' yard and figured maybe it's just tough to top this.
I'd have a photo to show you of Puerto Rico except I don't have the cable for my camera. I don't have it because either I lost it or it was stolen/lost from my luggage. Either is about equally possible. But I'm getting ahead of myself here.
I know that if you travel enough once in a while all the forces conspire to give you a truly bad trip. This trip is, apparently, mine. That said, it's not too bad. Here's what's been happening. I got up early on Sunday to get to the airport. I don't like getting up early but I accept that it's necessary. However, my flight was delayed. Then it was delayed again. Then it was finally cancelled. I was too busy fruiting around on the free wifi to get in line quickly enough to complain, so I got to twiddle my thumbs on hold (yay for cell phones) and figure out my next move. US Airways said they could get me out the next day. Jet Blue said they could get me out in a few hours. These two airlines don't really talk to each other in a computer fashion however, so it was time to shell out for a new ticket and hope against hope that the conference people would see this as a necessary added expense. As usual, my lack of "What would a normal person do in this circumstance?" sense means that I had far more nervousness choosing this route then I might have otherwise.
JetBlue got me out of there at 4 pm and then stuck me in JFK for a few hours, and on the tarmac in a rainstorm for an hour more. I got into San Juan at 1:45 in the morning -- this is totally a normal hour for me, not so much for other people on my flight -- and was in bed and asleep at the Intercontinental by around 3. My room faces the ocean. It's nice. The room they tried to put me in faced the highway and was right up against the elevators. I traded it in. I don't think I took anything out of my bag there. When I unpacked I realized that my stuff was soaking wet. Not like a little damp, like dripping wet. This was mostly okay. I hung stuff out to dry. One of my shirts may be a little screwed up. When I got back from my trip to Old San Juan today (more on that later) I went to offload my photos and realized my camera cable wasn't in my bag. Neither was my battery charger. Neither was my dongle, the stupid expensive dongle that I need for my laptop to talk to the projector. In fact everything in the side pocket of my bag was ... gone. Solving these problems takes time. I didn't lose anything I can't replace, but I do sort of need that dongle for my talk tomorrow. CompUSA has one I can buy, but I'll have to spend all day tomorrow on busses (or $40 on cabs) to buy one. I was hoping to go to the beach.
I've spoken to people at the places where I think I might have left my stuff, in case maybe this was my own fault. My day yesterday was pretty long, I forget things occasionally. I worried that when I told JetBlue that TSA left not one but two "we inspected this!" tags in my bag that they might hand off resposibility to them, but I guess that's not how they operate. They say they're treating this like a "pilferage" as if anyone wants my stupid cables. I'm treating it like a "some things fell out of my bag" case, but one that happened on JetBlue's watch. I talked to my contact here today and he mentioned something about being on "Carribean time" and said he didn't even know if my talk was going for 90 minutes as we discussed or 60 or even when it started. With this sort of approach, I'm not biting my nails down worrying about it, seems like they'd be happy with a decent puppet show and maybe a few duck jokes.
I am once agan confronted with the old travelling salesman/Jessamyn problem where I have to get myself from here to DC somehow. The good news is, this is easy. The bad news is, there are a ton of options. If I were going to LA, the answer would be simple "Fly! Find a cheap ticket!" but to DC the possibilities are all over the place. Drive? Bus? Bus + fly? Drive + train? Carpool? Rideshare? Trip + visit? Through NY? Boston? New Haven? Amherst?
I settled on a short drive + train + train plus a quickie stop in Brooklyn to see some friends and their baby who I haven't seen since she was about a week old. When I get to DC I'm staying in a hotel that costs more than I pay for a month of heating oil, but it's covered by the conference committee. I am going to be giving a fun talk on how to make Firefox (the browser) do the things you want it to do including make searching easier, make pages easier to read and putting more resources at your fingertips. I've been spending a lot of time mucking about with it this week. The real reason the train won out, of course, is that I can read on the train.
I can, of course, read here at home but there are a lot of other thigns to do as well. lately I've been watching James Burke'sConnection series and relearning some of the science and technology history that I had long since forgotten. I have also been watching some old Hercule Poirot mysteries with David Suchet, many of which the library has.
It's supposed to snow here tomorrow. I suspect there will be cherry blossoms in DC.
Aussie details - nitty gritty boring to all but the most OCD
Mar 21, 2007
So, I'm getting to the point that I can reliably wake up before noon and this makes me happy. I wasn't always able to do this before I left even, so there is improvement. I like to keep track of minute details of my trips. The good news is that Kate does too. This is just one more reason we are great travelling companions. We have a color-coded Excel spreadsheet of all of our trip expenses. I'd offer to email it to you, but I think Kate may not want people to know how much she spent on her Koala Glamour Shot.
I know that a lot of people dont go to Australia because it's spendy and time-consuming to even get there, but I figured I'd toss out some numbers about our trip in case they help anyone think that a trip like this would be within their reach. Really, you should do it. Some things were expensive, relatively speaking, in Australia: internet, fancy coffee, soda; many other things weren't: lodging, library cards and food.
I booked the whole trip via Kayak.com. It turned out to be cheaper for the sort of trip we were taking [flying into one Australian city and flying out of another] to fly out of Boston and back into Manchester New Hampshire. The tickets were $1800 each. Not chump change, but in a dollars-per-mile, not crazy either. We flew the overseas part of the trip via Qantas who is really the only airline I would consider making that trip with, though I have heard that Air New Zealand is also sort of great. They gave us socks, toothbrushes, late-night cocoa, early morning apples, popsicles and just generally didn't act like they were going broke just ferrying us around which is how I feel when I usually fly US airlines. You can't pick your seats beforehand though, which is nervewracking. However, I mentioned that I have tinnitus and really wanted to be far from the engine noise and both times we wound up seated together someplace nice.
My inside-the-country tickets were purchased online direct from Virgin Blue while they were having a sale. We got from Perth to Adelaide and then from Melbourne to Sydney for something like $500 US for both of us. This includes the fact that I mistakenly booked one of the flights a month early and had to change my reservations (which I could do online, simply and easily). All of my travel was reimbursed by the people I was working for which was nice. However, they paid me via wire transfers which all wound up $25 under due to fees (I realized this once I got home) leaving me $50 under for the trip. Annoying, but how do you fix that? The exchange rate is about 80 cents US to $1 AUS.
We stayed various ways and places. One of the groups put us up in the Hilton early on, then we stayed with a friend, then we stayed in caravan parks and hotels on the road trip, then we stayed at a YWCA Hotel in Sydney. Quality and prices varied a lot, but we found that we could find a nice place that slept three for between $90-120 US. Of course internet would cost anywhere from $30AUS/day to $10AUS/hour to not being available at all. New amazing discovery was wotif.com which is a powerful search engine for finding last minute deals. When we were in a jam we actually used it to make Sunday night reservations at 9:30 pm on that same night and it worked great.
My biggest non-usual expense was postcard and stamps and internet. Kate paid more for birthday presents for our Mom and the aforementioned Koala shot, but all told, I think I spent less than $50/day, total and Kate spent even less. We got some holiday money from our folks which allayed some of that, and stayed with friends and travelled cheaply, but we didn't share rooms with backpackers we didn't know, and didn't eat rice and beans for any meals.
The bigger expense is really the time. It was 30+ hours from door to door both ways. On the way there it was more like 38 for me because I took a bus to get to the airport. I'm never one of those people who says "well my time is valuable!" when people want help or when meeting runs long. On the other hand, you really have to be ready to hunker down and wait for a trip like this. The major part too is the week after wuzzy-headedness that is just now starting to really go away for me. I'm going to sleep before sunrise now but it took a while for that to really work. Here are a few other notes and numbers from the trip.
Number of new library cards: 2 Number of credit cards blocked because I used them in Australia: 2 (aka all of them) Number of bags I brought: 2 (same as in November) Boxes of chocolate I was given: 2 Number of MetaFilter meetups I went to: 2 Number of librarian get-togethers I went to: 3 Number of libraries I went to: 8-10 (do rest stop libraries count?) Tins of syrup I brought with me: 3 Number that were tasted by the customs guy: 1
7/18/2007