Category Archives: Travel

People Being People

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I’m flying to San Diego today on business and of course it offers a great people watching experience. I connected through Atlanta which means I got to ride the train between terminals. The doors of the train began to close and a woman who had just gotten on and who was jabbering away on her phone realized thaty her teenage daughter wasn’t with her. She jumped in the door to prevent them from closing and to give her daughter a chance to get on. She assumed that the doors would just pop back open like elevator doors but they just kind of squished her. A man standing behind her stepped up and helped pull them open and let her daughter on. Here’s the deal; the woman never stopped talking on the phone except to yell at her daughter to hurry, not even to thank the man who helped her. She didn’t even nod. The rest of us just shook our heads and kind of smiled at each other.

Sadly this type of thing is just too common, but this incident doesn’t match my all-time favorite which was the guy in an O’Hare bathroom who was talked on his phone while using the urinal and walking out of the bathroom. Of course he didn’t wash his hands, not that he would normally, but he was far too busy talking to do it anyway.

Shocked I Tell You

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Something that verges on miraculous happened to me on my trip to San Diego:  I experienced a round trip of flying that experienced no significant delays and two uneventful flights.  Sadly that qualifies as miraculous in modern air travel.

I traveled on USAir and the only notable negative was that during the flight to California, which took off at 6:00-ish, they ran out of meal and snack boxes (available for the bargain price of $6-ish dollars) before the stewardesses made it half way through the cabin.  Go figure that a flight that took off at dinner time would have hungry passengers.  I have no problem with them charging for meals if they let the passengers know ahead of time, but good gracious you’d think they would have planned to have a few more meals available on a trans-continental flight that took off at dinner time.  Luckily I’d already eaten on the way to the airport so I didn’t need a meal, and for the return flight I made sure I brought plenty of snacks to sustain me for the flight.

The way I see it the airlines’ primary job is to get passengers to their destinations on time, or close to it, in something approximating comfort.  The fact that when they do so it feels exceptional says a lot about what’s wrong with the airline industry.

Both flights were oversold so they spent a lot of time at the gates trying to bribe passengers to give up their seats in return for free round trip tickets anywhere in the lower-48 states.  That’s why I was glad to read last week that the Feds are raising the minimum rates that airlines have to pay when they bump passengers.  I think they’re going to need as much encouragement as possible to treat us right.

What to Do In Myrtle Beach When It Rains for a Week

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Not a whole heckuva lot, unless of course you don’t mind paying top dollar to go to one of the 79 Ripley’s properties in town.  To me Myrtle has become the anti-beach, a place that seems to exist to show exactly how badly man can screw up a natural wonder like a wide sandy beach.

The highlights from our time in Myrtle:

  • Time spent together as a family.  We had some very nice meals together and managed to laugh.  A lot.
  • A trip to the Huntington Beach State Park about 20 minutes south of Myrtle.  We were there on a rainy day so we had the place to ourselves.  Beautiful place, even in the rain, and juxtaposed with Myrtle Beach it highlights how un-pretty Myrtle truly is.
  • Getting seafood at a joint in Murrells Inlet. You can never go wrong with fresh seafood.

I can’t complain too much.  Our kids are getting old enough that I can see a day in the not-too-distant future when we’ll not be able to easily get all of us off on vacation together.  Sure the weather was awful, and granted I’m not a fan of Myrtle Beach, but I’ll take a week with all of us spending time together in Siberia over a week by myself in Hawaii. If nothing else this trip reminded me of that essential truth.

Hey Daddy!

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So on Saturday I land in Charlotte after a 9 1/2 hour flight from Germany.  I clear customs without a hitch, get my checked luggage and before I know it I’m in my car heading north on I-77 to Statesville to meet my family at a hot air balloon festival.  I’m low on gas so I stop to tank up and as I stand next to my car I hear a man say "Hey Daddy!" and I look around to find a guy in his 50’s and obviously down on his luck approaching me.  In one hand he has a plastic grocery back full of something and in the other he has what looks like a laptop case.

"Hey daddy", he says again and follows with, "you about a 40?"

"Huh?", I reply.

"You got about a 40 inch waist?", he asks.

"Uh, yeah I guess about that", I say more than a little warily.

"I got some boxers that’d look real nice on you and I give ’em to you cheap", he says.  I notice that he’s missing a front tooth but his other teeth look really healthy and white.  It looks like he brushes pretty regularly which is a change from most of the people who have tried to hustle me in the past.

"Uh, no thanks I have plenty of boxers," I tell him.

"They’re real cheap man, just $3," he says.

"No really I don’t need ’em," I insist.

"Okay, I’ll throw in a watch and it will still only be $3."

"No thanks," I say, a little annoyance creeping into my voice.  I’m tired and I just want to go see my family and I don’t feel like messing with this guy.  Forget that he’s probably having the kind of day that makes a 9 1/2 hour flight seem like nothing.  Hell, they fed me twice on the plane and this guy may not have had a square meal all day.  That’s not on my mind though because I’m tired and I’m only thinking about seeing Celeste and the kids.

"No offense man, I’m just trying to hustle for some money, okay Daddy?"

"No problem, I’m just not interested."

"Okay daddy," he says and then moves to the next pump where another car has just pulled in. 

"Hey daddy, what you got about a 50 inch waist?  I got some boxers that’d look real good on you and they’re only $3."

After I got back on 77 I thought about two things; I should have slipped the guy a couple of bucks and I should have told him that it’s not an effective sales technique to remind middle-aged guys how fat they’ve gotten.  I feel bad that I didn’t do either.

German TV

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So I woke up last night at 2 a.m. Frankfurt time, and that was after sleeping five hours.  Unfortunately I knew right away that I wasn’t going to get back to sleep any time soon so I decided to call home and then do some reading.  After the call and an hour or two of reading I clicked on the TV and started surfing through the 40 or so channels of TV that the hotel carries.  In the process I discovered some interesting things:

  1. Girls doing things to girls, if you get my drift, is a staple of German late night television.  At first I thought this was an interesting departure from the infomercials that are a staple of late night TV in the states, but then I realized that they were all hawking SMS p-rn services and s-x lines.  As I surfed the channels I counted at least five that ran these things, which means that over 10% of the stations had them.

    I’m still trying to figure out what kind of guy would get worked up with some supposed woman sending him messages like "U R so hot U R mkg me…" Of course the wireless services here are so far ahead of ours in the US that it would be a good bet that they deliver high quality video to pervs’ phones and they’re just using "SMS" in the same way that some people call all sodas "Coke".  Either way, you don’t see the "commercials" or the wireless p-rn back in the states. 

  2. They carry Al Jazeera and I have to tell you that if it wasn’t for the little symbol in the corner I would have thought it was another version of CNN, except with real reporters.  All the reporters I saw were British and considering that they were running opposite Wolf Blitzer they came off looking like geniuses.  Only when you get a chance to watch BBC, Sky TV and, yes, Al Jazeera do you begin to appreciate what unmitigated crap we have for national TV news programming in the states.  I think what I like best about the non-US networks is that they don’t all assume that the average viewer is ADHD and on his sixth cup of coffee in the last hour.  Stories have depth, some running several minutes, and the reporters and commentators address the audience with a calm and reserve that we haven’t seen on US television in at least 20 years.  What’s interesting to me is that Sky and Fox are both owned by Rupert Murdoch, but Sky makes Fox look like a production of some local high school’s Young Republicans group. Shows you what he thinks of we Amerikaners.  Not that Sky comes across as particularly great, but in comparison to our junk it seems almost NPR-worthy.  FYI, one of the most viewed videos on Sky’s site is the manager at the KFC in Statesville NC (about 1/2 hour from my house) fighting off a shotgun-toting robber.  It really is a small world.
  3. EuroSport is the anti-ESPN.  Nary a studio full of retired players or coaches as panelists to be found and lets just say that the sports they carry are hard to come by on the west side of the Atlantic.  In the course of browsing I saw sumo wrestling, snooker and team handball.  The last is a hybrid of soccer and basketball that I’d love to give a try, but I doubt I’ll ever get the chance.  Note to ESPN execs: can you please dial back the BS and start just giving us the sports?  You’re beginning to remind me of MTV (what happened to the music?) and not in a good way.
  4. It’s a trip seeing movies with German voice-overs, especially the male voices.  The Germans all sound much more "manly" than the original actors, especially guys like Steven Seagall. 

Hopefully that will be the extent of my German television reviews since I’d like to get at least a little sleep over the next few days.

Renting a Car in Europe?

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Here’s something I wish I’d known about six months ago.  Apparently if you’re an American traveling to Europe and need to rent a car you should try to do so on the rental company’s website for that country because it will cost you a lot less to rent the same car.  From a New York Times Travel section article by Michelle Higgins (found via bookofjoe):

FOR a trip to Barcelona, Jorge Cuadros, a lawyer from Alexandria, Va., turned to the Internet to book a rental car. On Hertz.com,
Mr. Cuadros was quoted a price of 626.12 euros for an automatic
Mercedes for five days in October. At $1.42 to the euro, that amounted
to about $890.

Out of curiosity, Mr. Cuadros switched to his native Spanish tongue and checked Hertz’s Spanish Web site, www.hertz.es,
where the same car was offered for 263.92 euros — about 58 percent
less. He had stumbled upon a little-known trick that many online travel
companies would rather keep quiet.

“It seems that the car
rental companies are in some cases even charging twice the price to
residents of the U.S. than to Europeans,” said Mr. Cuadros, who
compares the practice to how some pharmaceutical companies charge more
in the United States than they do overseas. “This is abusive behavior.”

And it’s not just the car rental companies:

In an effort to expand their global reach, online travel agencies
based in the United States like Expedia and Travelocity, as well as
individual airlines and car rental agencies, are creating Web sites
geared to foreign counties. Travelocity, for example, just started Travelocity.com.mx for customers in Mexico. It also has Travelocity.co.uk for Britain; www.Travelocity.de
for Germany; and Travelocity.ca for Canada. Expedia has 13 foreign
sites including Expedia.dk (Denmark), Expedia.it (Italy) and Expedia.fr
(France).

The savings can be considerable. An Expedia.com search for a round-trip flight from Melbourne to Sydney
in August yielded a $350 airfare on Qantas as the lowest available,
including taxes and fees. The same flight was listed on Expedia’s
Australian Web site, Expedia.com.au, for 224.34 Australian dollars, or
about $187 at 1.20 Australian dollars to the U.S. dollar.
Expedia.com.au also listed a lower fare (about 200 Australian dollars)
on Virgin Blue, an Australian low-cost carrier; the United States site
did not search that airline.

So how’s this for a business concept: line up a company offshore that can offer multilingual service, promote discounted rates to American travelers and then have your offshore service book the travel and take a cut of the difference?

For my own sake I think I need to learn at least one other language.

No, the OTHER Left

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Last week while I was in Northern Virginia on business I was invited to go with some friends to the Shenandoah Brewing Company in Alexandria to brew some beer.  Since brewing beer entails a lot of waiting and sampling the various products brewed at the facility we decided it would be prudent to take a cab there.  Anyone from that area can tell you that taking a cab is not as straight forward as it is in other parts of the contiguous United States.

First, you have to wait for the call from the cab driver saying, in barely intelligible English, that he can’t find your location.  After giving directions in the same dialect you use when conversing with tech support for your computer, or phone, or DVD player, or MP3 player, or…you get the idea, you’re picked up 1/2 hour past the scheduled time.  At that point you give the address of your destination, sit back and enjoy the ride while you wait for him to tell you you’re there when obviously you’re not because you’ve stopped in front of the one remaining vacant lot in the surrounding 300 square miles.  Eventually you realize you’re only about a mile from your intended destination so you begin to bark out directions, which should be fairly easy except that every time you say "turn left" the guy turns right.  Literally you scream, "No the OTHER left" and he gets all flustered and starts making these guttural click-click noises that mean something on the other side of the world.  Here they just mean you know the guys cussing you out but you don’t how, and since you just want to get where you’re going you start talking to him like he’s your four year old kid that you’ve just made cry.  "It’s okay Mr. Cab Driver, just take it easy and turn left up there in front of that really bright red sign…the one on your left…NO, THE OTHER LEFT.  No, not the green sign, the REEEEED sign.  Ah, there you go."  Thankfully he manages to avoid hitting the one person in Northern Virginia who walks from one place to another and deposits you at your destination a mere 45 minutes late. 

That’s exactly how our trip went last week.  We were mildly concerned about getting home because after brewing beer all night we weren’t so sure we’d know right from left and were pretty sure we wouldn’t be speaking intelligible English. Luckily another member of the group showed up late, stayed sober, and gave everyone a ride home.  Poor guy had to put up with us demanding a McDonald’s Drive-Thru and then being boxed in when a police cruiser in pursuit of a suspect screeched to a halt at the end of the drive-thru and continued the pursuit by foot. 

Having a front row seat to a live episode of COPS! reminded me why I don’t go out any more.  Well, that and the rather nasty headache I had the next day.  It ends up the stuff we were drinking had something like an 8% alcohol content, which means we were having a kind of 2-for-1 special on regular beer.  Add that to the fact that I’m no spring chicken and you have the recipe for a not-so-fresh feeling the next morning.

Despite my day-after discomfort I highly recommend the experience at Shenandoah Brewing.  After all, nothing says you HAVE to sample so much of the stuff and it is a really interesting process to watch and participate in.  If you have the choice use a designated driver since I’m not entirely confident you’ll get home if you take a cab.

Tanks, Missiles and Guns in France of All Places

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Tankmuseum17_2
When we went to France in the spring we took a day trip to see the Troglodyte caves and then the Musee des Blindes in Saumur, France.  For those of you who are like me and would travel to France without grasping a single word of the French language the Musee des Blindes is a tank museum.  If you’re wondering why I’m bringing it up now, well, I finally got around to uploading all of our pictures from the museum onto Flickr.  If you like you can see them here.

Michaelerinjustinattankmuseum_vid_2
The picture at the top of this post is our family in front of the museum and the picture to the left is a heartwarming shot of my kids inside the museum.  Since I’ve never owned a gun in my life, and the preconceived notion we Americans have of the French as being, well, French, I find it ironic that this NRA-approved, warm and fuzzy image of the armed-to-the-teeth American family was shot in the heart of the Loire Valley.

One More Reason to Hate Flying

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One of the folks at Boing Boing got caught up in a TSA snag at LAX:

  I flew from JFK to LAX today, and something really weird happened when I arrived (at about 230PM local time).

I walked from the arrival gate towards baggage claim, and when I was
about halfway there, all of a sudden about a dozen or more TSA
personnel and private security staff appeared, shouting STOP WHERE YOU
ARE. FREEZE. DO NOT MOVE. Not just at me, but all of the travelers who
happened to be wandering through the hallway at that moment.

Some of the TSA guards then backed up against walls in the hallway, and
sort of barked at anyone who tried to move a few feet away from their
"spot," like towards chairs to sit down or whatever…

After 30 minutes, the TSA people said, okay, you may leave now. And
everyone unfroze, and went and got their bags. No explanation. I guess
I should have pressed for an explanation, or demanded to know why we
were being held without our consent and without a provided reason, but
I was really tired and just wanted to get the hell out of there and go
home. Perhaps I was wrong to have just walked away.

Add this kind of experience to extended delays, cancelled flights, seats that most 10 year olds can barely fit in and having to mull about with thousands of other travelers just as annoyed as you are and you can see why I don’t fly anymore unless I absolutely have to.

Bikes, Bigots and Barns

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We’ve lived in Lewisville, NC for over three years now and every other week for all three years I’ve heard the following from Celeste: “We’ve lived here for ‘fill in the amount of time’ and we haven’t really explored the mountains.”  So earlier this week I decided to plan a family outing to the mountains on the last official day of the kids’ summer break, which was yesterday (Friday, August 23, 2007).  Well, let’s just say we ended the summer with a bang.

First we rousted the kids from bed at about 7:00 so we could be on the road at 8:00.  We hit the road on time, a miracle in and of itself, and stopped at the McDonald’s in Yadkinville for a utilitarian breakfast that we could eat on our way to our first destination.  Keep this in mind as it becomes significant later in our story.

After leaving McDonalds we headed northwest to the town of Damascus, VA where we planned to rent bikes for our entire family plus Michael’s friend Daniel.  Although the mileage between Lewisville and Damascus wasn’t too significant it still ended up taking us over two hours to get there because it was mostly two lane mountain roads and we must have been behind every driver in Appalachia that preferred driving 15 miles under the speed limit.

Upon our arrival in Damascus we found Adventure Damascus where I’d made our reservations.  For $23 a person they rented us bikes and provided a shuttle to the top of Whitetop Mountain where we could ride our bikes almost entirely downhill for 17 miles back to town on the Virginia Creeper Trail.  And they throw in a bottle of water!
PhotoThey wouldn’t let me have my first selection for a bike (see picture at left) but after they found an appropriate ride for all of us they loaded us into their van (see picture below) and took us on a 40 minute ride up the mountain.  At the trail head we disembarked and made sure we all knew how to shift gears, which really wasn’t necessary since we pretty much coasted almost the entire way.

PhotoLike I said we had about a 17 mile ride back to town.  After about three miles I started hearing complaints about butts hurting and thought, “This may not have been the brightest idea”, but the kids and Celeste motored on and half way through the ride Celeste told me she thought it was a fantastic way to spend a day.  Score one for dad/husband!

The ride down the mountain really was great even though we picked a day of record high temparatures to make the trip.  The trail is an old rail bed that was converted over to use for bikers, hikers and horseback riders.  It’s fairly wide, has almost no major obstacles, runs by a stream which provides a kind of natural air conditioning and is shaded almost the entire way.  Even better the grade is very gradual so it doesn’t take a lot of skill on a bike to navigate it.  There are also plenty of places to stop and wade in the stream if you like.  In it’s entirety the trail is about 37 miles long and ends in Abingdon, VA so if you’re up to a more strenuous ride you can find it there.  We were happy to do the 17 mile coast.

After we got back to Damascus we decided to step into Damascus Eats for some lunch.  It’s a nice little joint with sandwiches, burgers and such that we all found to be tasty.  Celeste opted for the daily pulled pork BBQ special and it was really quite good.  The kids and I went for burgers and sandwiches and all of us finished off our meals.  None of us saved space for banana pudding, but it looked good.

Unfortunately this is the point in the story where the import of our decision to stop at the Yadkinville McDonalds for breakfast became apparent.  To avoid embarassment I will simply say that two of the kids and one of the adults had the same thing for breakfast and all three began their suffering here.  One of the adults had to make two quick trips to the facilities before leaving Damascus for our next destination, which was to be the aptly named (for us) Blowing Rock, NC.  With the adult feeling much better we hit the road and headed south on VA-91 and made our way into Tennessee.

About 15 minutes into Tennessee one of the kids in the back of the van started groaning.  I, being your average Dad, ignored the growing sounds of discomfort.  Celeste, being your average Mom, whipped around and asked what was wrong.  The afflicted child said, “My stomach is burning really bad.”  Celeste gave me a knowing look, so I piped up with “If you’re gonna blow chunks let me know so I can pull over.”  The afflicted child simply said, “It’s not that end Dad.  I really need to go to the bathroom so can you find one fast?”  At that point another of the kids said “I really gotta go too.”  That’s all I needed to hear.

Fortunately we came upon a promising little establishment on the side of the road with a sign that said “Flea Market”. I pulled in to the gravel lot doing about 30 and spit gravel as I slammed to a stop in front of a door that identified the establishment as a bar.  The kids jumped out and did that little dance we all know too well and then made their way with Celeste inside.  A minute or two later she came back out and asked me to go in and check on them.

Once inside I realized that we’d hit the mother lode of honky-tonks.  The place smelled of stale beer and the indefinable stench of ne’er-do-well drunks.  Fortunately the place didn’t have any customers yet as it was still mid-afternoon and apparently the locals don’t believe in starting their weekends early on Fridays.

I found the proprietor lounging on the back deck of the bar and asked the way to the bathroom.  He pointed me in the right direction and I found the kids in the ladies room since the men’s room was standard honky tonk fare and had two malfunctioning urinals and one barely standing toilet.  Both kids seemed to be doing okay considering the circumstances and I made my way out to the bar to thank the owner for letting us use his facilities.  That’s when things got real interesting and I’ll relate the conversation as best I remember it.

Me: “Hey, thanks alot for letting us use the bathrooms.  The kids were really hurtin’.”

Bar owner: “No problem.  Been there plenty of times myself.  So where you from?”

Me: “Winston-Salem.”

Bar owner: “You got blacks down there?”

Me, just a tad surprised: “Uh, well yeah.”

Bar owner: “We don’t got them up here.  Well we got one black in town but he’s been here his whole life so he don’t count.  I’m from the Keys and found this place by accident; me and the wife took a wrong turn on one of our trips and we found this place.  Down in Florida we got lots of Cubans and blacks and I got tired of all the crime.  Up here I don’t have to worry about my wife getting mugged walking to her car.  Anyway, when I saw how much land I could get for my money I decided to move here and open up my own place. It’s great.  You know you can get a three bedroom house around here for $60,000?”

Me, wondering if this is some kind of setup: “Huh.”

Bar owner: “Yeah it’s real nice around here.”

At this point I was still waiting for the kids and didn’t really know what to say so I figured I’d ask him something to keep him talking.

Me: “So how’s the bar doing?”

Bar owner: “Ah man it’s great and it’s only going to get better.  You see this was a dry county not too long ago but I was able to open up selling beer only and this place just rocks at night.  They still don’t allow bars to sell liquor by the drink but I found out that I could sell it by the drink if I was classified as a resort.  To get a resort classification all you have to do is have eight hotel-like rooms and 13 camping lots.  So I put eight rooms upstairs and I got 13 camping spots out back.  Come on let me give you a tour.”

That’s when I really thought I was being set up.  I didn’t have that tingly feeling on the back of my neck like I was about to get my bell rung, but I was having a hard time believing this was real.  I mean he didn’t know me from Adam but he’d jumped to the conclusion that I was in the big white boat with him.  I’m thinking “this just doesn’t happen anymore” and I’m wondering if he’s just feeding me crap as the price for letting the kids use his john and I’m also wondering what the punch line is going to be.

I’d already decided that now wasn’t the time to break out my rhetorical arguments like “So you don’t have any white folks ripping each other off around here?” since my kids were at the mercy of his hospitality, but I wasn’t sure if I was pushing my luck by following him outside. Eventually I figured if he really wanted to mess with me he could just as easily do it inside as out so I followed him behind his building.  Sure enough he had a spot out back for thirteen campers (only one was being used).

Bar owner: “I’m putting another 40 camping slots up the hill and it’ll get a lot busier once I have that done and put out some signs.  I’m also getting close to finishing up a fine-dining restaurant next to the bar.”

Me: “Huh.”

At this point we headed back inside to wait for the kids.

Bar owner: “You got a trailer?”

Me: “Naw, we’re just on a day trip to check out the area.”

Bar owner: “Well, you ever come back with a trailer you should camp her here and check out some of the land.  I had a good ol’ boy who came in and got drunk last week. He’d just inherited two acres riverfront with 11 cars on it that he wanted to sell me for $60,000.  Can you believe that?  Really the only problem I had was when I was still driving my Hummer.  That stood out around here so something that would normally cost $100 was suddenly costing me $300, so I just went out and got me a GMC like everyone else and that stopped happening.”

I thought about pointing out that price gouging was a form of mugging but discretion being the better part of valor I just said, “Huh.”

Bar owner: “Now the education here ain’t much.  I got two little ones and we home school them, but with what you can get for the dollar here it’s worth it.  You oughta come on up here and check it out.  Like I said we got no crime here.  We’re startin’ to get Hispanics but not like down there in North Carolina.”

Me: “Huh.”

Bar owner: “Yeah you should definitely think about it.”

At that point the kids came out and we were ready to go.  I thanked the bar owner again and he again extended the invitation to come back.  Then we were gone.

Feeling exhausted and wondering if the day could possibly get any weirder Celeste and I agreed that we’d do Blowing Rock another day.  We found 421 south and started home.

Of course Boone was one big traffic jam so we were stuck there for about half an hour and then when we got through that mess we were able to see thunderheads in front of us.  At Wilkesboro the heavens opened up and started pelting us with hail.  Celeste was a little freaked, and the kids were quiet for once which was weird in and of itself, but I decided to see if we could get through it and by the time we reached North Wilkesboro the skies had cleared.

We made it all the way back to Forsyth County before we were confronted with the coup de grace of weirdness for the day.  Just past the Shallowford Road exit we found a barn in the right hand lane of 421.  It had slipped off the trailer being used to haul it and stood not so majestically on the highway with the haulers and a couple of state troopers looking on with befuddlement in the case of the former and be-pissed-off-ness in the case of the latter.  I decided that was a fitting end to our escapade, so after dropping the kids off at the house Celeste and I circled back around to get a picture for posterity’s sake.  And with this picture our tale ends:

Photo