Category: Travel

This morning we visited the new Seattle Public Library building. It’s an extraordinary, surprising and inspiring work of architecture. We took the strange, green-yellow escalators up to the reading room, and then walked down the spiral stacks structure, emerging into the stunning womblike meeting room level. Rather than posting any of the inadequate photos that I took, let me recommend that you check out the photo gallery and virtual tour at the Seattle Times’ page.

We visited the Museum of Flight this morning. I was last there 4 or 5 years ago, I think, and it’s grown significantly. The new Personal Courage Wing focusses on combat aviation of the two World Wars; a dreadful title, but a stunning exhibit. The section on World War One does a great job of relating the air action to the grinding, bloody mess that was trench warfare. (Too often the affairs of men like Bishop and von Richthofen, and machines like the Sopwith Camel and Fokker Triplane, are portrayed as if in another world, unconnected with the slaughter below.)
There was an interesting presentation by two docents entitled Blackbird Tip-to-Tail, in which they described the history of the Lockheed Blackbird program and conducted a detailed walk-around of the unique M/D 21 variant in the Museum. How fast could that thing really go? It was designed for Mach 3.2-3.5, and according to the docents none of the pilots really pushed it beond that, even though they were only using 70% throttle at that speed. Despite rumours to the contrary, it was never actually taken to Mach 4 – nobody wanted to be the one to find the actual limits.
And then across the road from the main museum is the Airpark, with a Concorde, Air Force One (the VC-137B version of Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon), the first Boeing 747, and others. So after dreaming for years that one day I might get to fly in a Concorde, I finally got to walk through one….
(Click the thumbnails for the full-sized images.)

I just arrived back in Brookline, MA after flying from LHR to BOS. The flight was late, due mainly to fierce headwinds: we took an extremely northerly route, up to the southerly tip of Greenland (around 60N 45W) and then over to make landfall over central Labrador before heading SSW towards Boston.
On Saturday I drove my mother to visit some friends in south-east London; a gruelling drive through patchy freezing fog down the M40, round the M25, and up the A21. It didn’t help that the rental car – a Fiat Uno – really sucked: the pedals were too far to the left and too close together. Not only did this mean that I occasionally caught the accelerator when I was braking; there was nowhere for me to rest my left foot, so I had to hover over the clutch or put my foot flat on the floor. (And the car had no torque, and the gear ratios were rubbish, necessitating more shifting than usual.) By the end of of the drive (2 hours each way), my left ankle was showing signs of unaccustomed fatigue.
We got back to Oxford about 7, and I was feeling desperately tired. However my brother and his wife were there, and we decided to try out a new Chinese restaurant for dinner, to see if it would revive me. That did the trick – even though sake doesn’t really go with Chinese food! (Better with Cantonese than with other styles, I suspect.)
And to round off the evening, I stayed up to watch Match Of The Day and saw a thrilling game between Southampton and Middlesbrough. Southampton was 2-0 up as the match drew to a close, and it looked as if the hapless Saints (next to the bottom of the Premier league) were finally going to win against a strong opponent (currently 5th). Then in the 89th minute an inadvertant deflection from a corner (recorded as an own goal) made it 2-1, and seconds before the final whistle Downing thumped in a beautiful shot for Middlesbrough to snatch a draw.

It’s just after dawn here in Carmel Valley, CA. A cold night (around 30F), and a beautiful clear morning. Since Merry’s parents have sold the house and are moving soon, this will be my final Carmel Valley morning. We’re heading up to Santa Cruz (where Chris went to school at UCSC), then over 17 to San Jose to get a flight back to Boston. And (sigh) it looks as if the plane (AA 757) is going to be 100% full….

A synopsis of the last few days…. On Friday we flew from Boston to Seattle for a weekend with Chris and Celeste. On Saturday we drove down to Renton to ride the Spirit of Washington train over to the Columbia Winery for lunch. Then on Sunday we went up to the Joe Bar for coffee, swung by the cathedral to meet folks, and then after lunch went to the Seattle Art Museum to see the stunning exhibition on Spain in the Age of Exploration. We would have gone on to look at the other exhibitions in the museum, but a fire alarm put paid to that. (This is getting to be a habit.)

On Monday morning we flew down from Seattle to San Jose. The plan was that we should get to SJC around 10:30; then Merry would meet up with her parents and drive down to Carmel Valley, while I picked up a rental car and head up to Sun’s Menlo Park campus for an important meeting. Initially things went thoroughly pear-shaped. First, we got a phone call from our alarm service saying that the burglar alarm had gone off, and that the police had been dispatched. Then Alaska Air delayed our flight from 8:14 to 9:35. (At least that gave me time to talk to the Brookline police and confirm that everything seemed to be OK at home.) The flight down the coast was OK, although the clouds obscured Mount St. Helens, and it was rather bumpy. And then when we reached San Jose the rendezvous with Merry’s parents didn’t work as planned. AARGH!! But eventually everything was sorted out, and I was able to phone in to the first 30 minutes of the meeting while driving up 101; the rest of the meeting went just fine.

We’re about to depart on a typically complicated trip. This one involves flying to Seattle for the weekend, then going down to Silicon Valley for a couple of days (work – for me, anyway); then down the coast to Carmel Valley for Thanksgiving, and home via San Jose. And, mirabile dictu, all of the flights are non-stop.

Collective frustration and optimism for a bunch of Sun engineers, marketeers, and managers is….
We’re at a week-long workshop held in a secure facility, which means no network connections, WiFi, etc. So we all book into the same hotel (so we can share cars), and we obviously pick a hotel that proudly advertises free Internet access. And then the hotel WiFi goes out… for several days. The poor desk clerk, who has no control of things, gets harrassed by all and sundry. Just now, in sheer desperation, a colleague and I walked to another hotel just down the road and paid $10 each to get a few hours of our “drug of choice” – pure WiFi Internet, served straight up, no chaser.
Although it has been an occasionally frustrating week (bad weather, no opportunity to visit the city, not even a quick look around the Air and Space Museum, though we drive past it twice a day), overall I have to say that it’s been a very productive one. It’s always good to get a chance to work closely with colleagues from California, Colorado, New Hampshire, and England, whom I usually encounter as disembodied voices on a phone conference. As usual, the challenge is going to be sustaining the team commitment and energy after we all head home and have to work with out different organizations, with colleagues who haven’t been a part of this workshop. Nonetheless I’m very optimistic about this particular initiative. We’ll see. Kudos to my colleagues Brian Wong and Mary Vanleer….

Yes, I’m here – so yes, the hotel WiFi works. But the journey was interesting. The flight was United 861, a routine 415 mile hop in a Boeing 757 from BOS to IAD. I checked in online from home, and managed to swap my middle seat for a window – 30A. Boarding was uneventful, though the flight was absolutely full.. The pushback was delayed slightly, and the captain came on the PA to explain that there were aircraft in the “alley” blocking us in; he also mentioned that “radio communications are available on Channel 9”. (This is my favourite thing about United – if corporate policy permitted, I’d only fly on United, just to listen to ATC on channel 9. But anyway….)
A minute or two later the aircraft was pushed back, and as it was, there was an audible bump. We stopped, and suddenly channel 9 switched from radio to muzak. Hmmm…. We sat there for about 15 minutes. Eventually the captain announced that during the push-back “the push bar had been bent”, and he was “having a maintenance engineer check it out.” After a further delay, we taxied out, and normal channel 9 was resumed. Obviously we’d missed our “slot” into IAD, so we were held at the “Bravo hold point” until the top of the hour (0000Z) before we were allowed to take off. (We also switched our call-sign – from “United 861” to “United 8143” – to reflect the fact that we’d had to file a new flight plan.) The flight was uneventful, and so was the landing, though I must admit I held my breath as the nose gear hit the tarmac and reverse thrust came on. We were about 30 minutes late.
In the “mobile lounge” that transports passengers between terminal C and the main building I caught up with the captain of our flight and chatted to him about the incident at Boston. What had actually happened was that during pushback the tug driver turned a bit too sharply, and rather than the tow bar steering the nose gear, it popped off the lugs on either side on the gear. “The tug driver isn’t an engineer,” said the captain, “and I wanted someone to take a look at it to make sure that it hadn’t damaged anything.” We talked about what it might have hit, and agreed that “it’s better to fix these things on the ground – they’re a bitch to repair in-flight!” Various aviation geek stories ensued. “I notice you turned off channel 9 when it happened,” I said, and we discussed the fine balance between keeping people informed and alarming them unnecessarily.
So overall it was an very enjoyable flight, more interesting than most.
P.S. Chantilly is the Virginia community occupied by Dulles airport; it’s also where my hotel is. Of course I take this on trust; the hotel is indistinguishable from thousands of others across North America (and now, sadly across Europe too).

Time for another trip: I’m heading out of here to fly down to Washington DC for a week’s seminar/workshop/training. (Categories blur.) I’m going to be in a hotel close to Dulles airport, working in an office close to Dulles airport, and I’m not renting a car, so who knows if I’ll have any time to get into the city? Last time I was there I went to a really cool Ethiopian restaurant not far from Dupont Circle….
And yes, the hotel has WiFi. So I’ll be blogging.

We’re flying home to the States today. The day started with the hotel fire alarm going off at 6:20am just as I was turning on the shower. That was exciting. While we were sitting outside in the car, waiting for the all-clear, I read Robert Fisk in today’s Independent on the third anniversary of 9/11. Powerful and pointed as always. (Hands up those who knew where Fallujah was three years ago.)
After showering and packing, I came over to the WiFi hotspot to log in. As I started typing this, Morrissey’s America Is Not The World started playing over in the restaurant. I’ve heard it almost every day while I’ve been here. What a tragedy, that Bush and his henchmen should so totally squander, trash, and sh*t upon the worldwide compassion and empathy that followed 9/11. And how depressing that Americans appear unable to see Bush for what he is.
Talking to people over here, mostly professional or academic, I find a curious attitude towards the US Presidential election. Of course they are interested, and of course they hope that Bush is defeated, but it’s not accompanied by any great expectations. It’s almost as if they’ve written America off: it’s a hopeless case, perhaps it will come to its senses some day, but there’s no point in thinking too much about that. (I saw one op-ed piece that pointed out that since the actions of the US had such an impact on everybody around the world, maybe we all should be entitled to vote for the POTUS. And the lapsing of the assault gun ban was the occasion for the usual head-shaking about the suicidal insanity of a gun-drenched culture.)
Of course this raises more questions than it answers. But that’s for another occasion.
Update: We’re now home – but not before experiencing yet another fire alarm: this time in Heathrow Terminal 3. Every passenger in the terminal was herded into the structure that links the terminal to the more remote gates, while ear-splitting sirens blared overhead. It was 20 minutes before the Terminal was declared safe.