I’m in San Francisco on business and I’m staying in the Parc 55 hotel. They charge for internet access here and it’s $12.95 per 24 hours, whether it’s wireless or wired. Okay, I’ve been robbed for internet access by hotels before but generally the connection works better than dial-up. Not so here. I’m (internet) partying like it’s 1999.
I read this article in the Washington Post with great interest. It’s about HOT lanes being built on the Capital Beltway in Northern Virginia that will have fluctuating tolls depending on such factors as the average speed on the road, the number of users at a particular time, etc. According to studies done for the HOT project the average rush hour cost would be about $1.54 per mile an the lanes will run 14 miles from Springfield (home of the infamous "Mixing Bowl" where the Beltway, I-95 and I-395 all converge) to the Dulles Toll Road. So that comes to an average toll of about $21.56 to use the full 14 miles, but if the traffic is really and the traffic is threatening to overwhelm the HOT lanes the toll operators can raise the price to price out people who don’t really need to get where they’re going that fast.
The article gives average time savings for the HOT lanes as well, and they don’t sound that impressive, but again that’s average. At peak times I have a feeling that you’ll have people paying a lot of money to save significant amounts of time. I used to use that route regularly when I lived in NoVa and I can tell you that that stretch of road at the height of rush hour can literally take you hours to get through, especially if it’s raining. Since I haven’t lived there for four years and I know how much worse the traffic gets year by year I can only imagine how bad it is now.
If I still lived in NoVa I could easily imagine paying the toll on an irregular basis in times that I needed to make one of the kids’ school events or had a meeting I could not miss. Unfortunately I could easily imagine paying that toll, whizzing through that 9 mile corridor and finding myself stuck in a traffic jam on the other end. Thus you understand one of the motivations we had for moving the hell away from NoVa. That ain’t a way to live.
Ever driven the Blue Ridge Parkway when the leaves are changing color in the autumn? It’s just awesome. Ever wanted to spend a quiet weekend up there, absolutely away from it all and relax for a few days as you roam the area and enjoy the scenery? If so, I have the place for you.
Sadie’s Place is a small country house that Debbie and Steve Erickson have converted into a weekend getaway. You can literally be on the Parkway in less than a minute from their location, but it also features a small creek running just yards away from the front door and a fantastic porch for sitting and sipping hot cider or your adult beverage of choice. (Full disclosure: We’re relatives, but I’d write this anyway if we weren’t).
From Sadie’s Place you can also be in Laurel Springs in just minutes and you can be in West Jefferson or Sparta in a little under 1/2 hour. Laurel Springs is home to Thistle Meadow Winery and West Jefferson is home to all kinds of cool establishments.
Debbie and Steve will be happy to take care of you, so give yourself a break this fall and spend a few days up in North Carolina’s beautiful Blue Ridge area. I’m sure Debbie and Steve would love to make you feel right at home.
Sadie’s Place
For rental information contact:
Steve or Debbie Erickson
(919) 545-9204 or (336) 416-6080
Email: mooonbaby AT yahoo.com
Next time I complain about air travel remind me that it can always get worse/scarier. For evidence I give you today’s emergency landing of a small US Airways plane at our very own Piedmont Triad International Airport. WXII has video of the landing here.
The short Greensboro-Charlotte flight is a very common flight for folks connecting to more distant locales from the Triad and so I think many of us can imagine ourselves sitting in that teeny-weeny prop plane and looking out the window to see one of the propellers stop working. When I flew from Burlington, VT to La Guardia last week I was on a plane just like the one with the problems today and I can tell you that one of my thoughts was, "I wonder if they ever have engine failures on these things." Of course you could think the same things about small jets too, but for some reason it seems so much more likely with a propeller. I realize it’s not logical to think that way, but maybe because you can actually see the propeller in action it seems much more vulnerable to failure than a jet with it’s turbine function all but invisible to the naked eye.
Anyway, I can tell you that if I was on that flight I’d have given the pilot a loud ovation the second we touched down safely. I also would have kissed the ground as soon as I was off the plane. Not sure how I’d have felt about getting on another flight though.
I flew up to Burlington VT for my first all-hands meeting with my new employer, Fletcher/CSI. I’d never been up here before, despite having siblings who attend(ed) the University of Vermont (I know, shame on me) and I have to say I should have made it here a lot sooner. We had meetings all day yesterday and today, and my only glimpse of the town was when we had a company dinner at Sweetwaters downtown, but even based on that limited experience I can tell you I very much look forward to returning. This is truly a beautiful place, and it’s a travesty that I never visited my brother or sisters while they were in school here. Actually I have one sister still in school so hopefully she’ll be seeing me here a few times before she graduates.
Unfortunately on this trip I didn’t have any free time to do any visiting, but I’ll make sure to schedule extra time to visit when I return. For now I’m sitting at my gate at the airport (BTV) and it looks like my flight to LaGuardia will be delayed 1 1/2 hours, which ought to make trying to get my connector to GSO a little interesting. I just checked that flight on FlightStats and it’s delayed too, so hopefully I’ll be okay.
I know all this because BTV has free wi-fi and their landing page when you log in is a nice mix of local weather and updated flight status for all upcoming flights. Since the flight status section is a feed from FlightStats it’s easy to connect through the site to check the status of connector flights. Very cool, and I wish GSO would offer the same.
Last time I typed and you read I was sitting in O’Hare waiting for my flight home. I must say that I had an exceptional run of good travel luck over the last 10 days. I had two business trips, one to San Diego and one to Chicago. In all I had six flights and in all that only two delays, the longest being about one hour. On the red eye home from California I had a young mother with a 7-month old baby in her lap sitting next to me and the baby slept the entire trip. Last night I was crammed into my seat next to a rather large person overflowing from the seat next to mine when the stewardess asked me if I’d like to move three rows back to one of the two empty seats on the whole flight, the other empty seat being the one offered to me. It’s been years since I’ve been this lucky.
So it should have come as no surprise when I walked in my door last night at 11:30 to find our refrigerator pulled away from the wall and lots of towels on the floor. It seems that while Celeste and the kids were at the kids’ swim meet last night the water line to the ice maker/water dispenser in the refrigerator had a blow out. Celeste came home to find water coming out of our basement ceiling and running down the wall just outside our storage closet. Keep in mind that the drop down ceiling and wall were just added to our basement three months ago when we had it finished. In other words it’s all brand new.
Shaking my head I made my way back to the bedroom to find Celeste sucking down a glass of red wine. She took one look at me and said, "I think I need to get drunk." This from a woman who’s had one too many drinks maybe two times in the 18 years I’ve known her. She didn’t proceed to get drunk, but she definitely bent my ear about the piece-of-**** refrigerator we bought when we moved here four years ago.
Can’t say I’d argue with her on that point. The auger that moves the ice from the ice maker to the ice dispenser broke exactly one day after the warranty expired. Then the motor in the ice maker started making horrific noises so I decided to fix the whole shebang. I got the motor fixed (see here), but never the auger. It really is a piece of crap.
Funny thing is that the seminar I just attended in Chicago featured two speakers one who works for Whirlpool. Guess which company manufactured our piece-of-**** refrigerator? When I get a chance I’m going to type a nice email to send him with some not-so-objective feedback on at least one of his company’s products.
Kharma’s a funny thing isn’t it?
Well, it looks like my last post, Random Stop?, attracted the most comments I’ve had on a post since I wrote about Ernest Angley. Writing about a hot-button issue like illegal immigration and wondering aloud if the police were racial profiling at a trafic stop AND getting a link from Esbee will do that. I haven’t responded to most of the comments because I’ve been working in Chicago since Sunday night and I’m just now getting the chance to sit in front of my computer for the first time since then. I’m sitting in O’Hare waiting for my flight back to GSO and honestly I’m too tired to respond effectively. I’ll do it tomorrow when my brain’s a little less fuzzy.
O’Hare’s fun for people-watching but not much else. The internet connection I paid $6.95 for is agonizingly slow. The same people who are fun to watch are often also rude, and many smell a little ripe. Maybe that’s the food court. Anyway, it’s a nuthouse. That makes for a great contrast with the GSO terminal, which is so quiet you could hold a meditation session in one of the 80% of gates that aren’t used at any given time.
Here’s how quiet GSO is. My flight out on Sunday night was scheduled to take off at 7:50 p.m. It was delayed an hour so I was hanging out in the little Sam Adams bar near the gates on the United side of the terminal. Tiger was struggling down the back-9 at the US Open and I was enjoying the show with about 10 of my fellow passengers. Unfortunately the bar shut down at 8:00 (8:00!) so we all had to leave, but luckily the TV was left on while the cleaning crew was doing their thing so we watched through the security gate. The cleaning crew finished right after Tiger teed off on the 18th and they shut off the TV so we all returned to the gate and a guy did a play-by-play while listening to the broadcast on his iPod. Classic.
I think we were the last flight out since the approximately 30 people on our flight were the last people in the terminal and the gate agent was so desperate to get rid of us he helped clean the plane when it arrived from some exotic locale, Minneapolis I believe. I think he had a party to get to.
I love flying out of GSO, but I wonder how long it can survive with so few passengers. Normally I’d mark up the experience to an anomaly, but the airport has been this sedate all four years I’ve been using it regularly. Sadly, it only seems to be getting worse.
Oh well. No more travel for a while, which is nice. I’ve met lots of interesting people over the last week and a half, which makes the travel more than bearable, but I’m looking forward to being home for a while. Not sure if Celeste and the kids feel the same, but they’re stuck with me so I think we’ll all adjust.
The trip to San Diego ended up being a good one. No flight delays and great weather definitely helped, but being able to spend a couple of days talking to some really smart people from companies in a variety of industries was really the highlight. If I’m going to spend four days away from the family it’s great to be able to learn a lot in the process, and the best way to learn is to surround yourself with people smarter than you are.
It’s also fun to have a "small world" moment. One of the people I met this week grew up a mile from one of the neighborhoods I lived in while growing up in Northern Virginia and since he’s a year younger than my brother they actually went to elementary school together. He now lives in Atlanta and since I had a layover in Atlanta we ended up on the same flight home, and when we ran into each other at the airport he invited me and another person from the conference into the Delta Lounge as his guests. Drinking free cocktails is a great way to pass the time at an airport.
In one of the conference sessions I attended I set next to a guy from a health care company and in the course of the group discussion he talked about a technology that had turned into a home run for his company. Ends up they had licensd it from Wake Forest University. That conversation helped reinforce to me how big a player WFU is despite its diminutive size and I’m darn glad we have it here in Winston-Salem.
Finally, on the last day of the conference I was trying to figure out how to kill the five or six hours I had until my flight. A couple of other conference goers had cars and were staying for the rest of the week so they offered to drive a bunch of us into the town of Coronado from the hotel, and then after doing some sightseeing and dinner they offered a ride to the airport to those of us flying out that night. So we got to walk through Coronado, see the beach, have a nice dinner and then have a comfortable ride to the airport. And as I mentioned before we also got to hang out in the Delta lounge. Nice!
Makes me wonder if fate has a nasty trip in store for me to try and even things out.
I’m in San Diego to attend a conference being held at the Loews Coronado Bay Resort. It’s a great location any time, but when the temp outside is 70 with a gentle sea breeze and the temp back home is closing in on 100 with that lovely North Carolina humidity it’s even better. Thankfully the conference organizers have scheduled some form of networking event on the terrace each day so we don’t spend all of our time in windowless meeting rooms.
BTW, it’s a lot more fun to attend a conference than to organize/run one. My company’s a sponsor of the event, but the way the conference is structured we aren’t stuck in an exhibit booth like at other events. We’re expected to participate in the interactive sessions and we’re invited to participate in all networking events. Makes for long days, but considering how many truly interesting and smart people I’ve met it’s definitely a great experience.
Conference link: Frost & Sullivan’s 4th Annual Innovations in New Product Development and Marketing 2008
Befuddled 