Category: Travel

This morning we went into Oxford to do some shopping – some more books (surely not?!) and some items for my mother. Lunch time rolled around, and we decided to try a place in the Covered Market that sells authentic Cornish Pasties. (No, nothing to do with costume accessories for West Country strippers..!) While Merry had a second cup of tea, I went round the corner to the Auto Model shop, with a vague idea of buying one more model.
In addition to the man who runs that branch, the district manager was there, ranting on the phone to someone. When he’d finished, and saw that I was about to buy a small bus model, he jerked a thumb in the direction of a pile of large boxes and asked if I had any idea what was in them. “Take a look at these before you buy anything,” he said, and opened the top box to reveal a 1/24 scale Sun Star RM8 Routemaster model. This is reckoned to be the finest bus model ever produced for retail; only a couple of thousand are being made, and all have been reserved for months. But he had one cancellation… and so I bought it, for £99, and arranged for them to ship it to the US for me. It’ll be the culmination of my collection; I doubt I’ll buy many more bus models after this. But what a way to go.

As I noted, the Little Chef next to my hotel has a WiFi hotspot. For some reason, they turn it off every night at 10 when they close. And the manager hasn’t told the staff that turning it on is part of the regular opening procedure. So this morning I came over at 7:15 for breakfast and a quick fix of Internet, and the WiFi was down, and the poor minimum-wage school-leaver who had just opened the store and restaurant had never heard of “WiFi” or “network”, and thought that the manager “might be getting in by 8:15.” (He wasn’t.)
Oh well, things are working now (mid afternoon). But I wonder why they turn it off at night. It probably takes less electricity than the Budweiser sign in the window….

I flew over to the UK on Friday for a week’s vacation. Good points: Virgin Atlantic upgraded us from Economy to Premium Economy for free; service was excellent. Bad points: the flight was oversold, and it took Virgin an hour to sort out who’s on and who’s off. And it was a daytime flight – I was neutral, but my wife preferred it. After the event, I am no longer neutral. Daytime eastbound transatlantic SUCKS. Instead of having a short, broken night which stresses your body into taking up the new schedule, you have a short broken day, so it’s impossible to get to sleep. Never again.
Normally when we come to Oxford we stay with relatives, but this time it wasn’t convenient, so we stayed at a random motorway-type hotel at the A34/A40 intersection. On Saturday morning we walked into the Little Chef diner next door for breakfast, and I saw a WiFi hotspot sign. “Heaven, I’m in heaven…” So that’s where I am now. (And of course the setup time on my PowerBook was just as long as it took me to type in a credit card number to buy a few hours of credit. Sweet.)
The weather here is perfect, and forecast to remain that way for our stay. So more anon, with pics (and perhaps video).

Time to get away for a bit…. We’d originally planned to be in Scandinavia for two weeks (starting yesterday), but we had to cancel that trip for various reasons. So we’re just going to head up to Maine for a couple of days. No Internet… no blog.

I just spent a fruitless half-hour on the United Airlines frequent flier website, checking availability of round-trip award flights from BOS to LHR.
Is everybody leaving Europe for the USA? Permanently????
How else can I explain the fact that for every date pair that I tested in August and September, I found one or two eastbound flights with available award seats, but zero (none, nada, zilch) westbound returns?
Of course there is an alternative explanation to “mass emigration”, but I’d prefer not to go to bed in a cynical frame of mind…

DisneyWorld is totally passé (whether in Florida, France, or Japan). I want to go to Suoi Tien Park! Or I do if it’s as much fun as it looks from the web site. I’m particularly interested in the Unicorn Palace with Hell Ten courts inside, a unique and magnificent way of education for people. I understand that this incorporates ten highly imaginative kinds of hell, designed for people guilty of different kinds of sin – shades of Dante. I’m not clear on how interactive the experience is….

I’m about to resume my twisted love affair with the Boeing 757. On Friday morning I’m heading off to Seattle to spend the weekend with my son, Chris. On Monday I’ll fly down to San Francisco, and I’ll be in the Palo Alto/Menlo Park area through Thursday for a series of business meetings. I’ll fly home on Friday the 16th.

The recent hiatus in blogging was in part the result of a business trip to Denver.
Continue reading “On the road again….”

OK, Chris did it first, but imitation is healthy, right?

create your own visited states map


create your personalized map of europe
or write about it on the open travel guide

Americans who learn that I’m from England often make some joke about the weather, usually something to do with rain. Now in my 20+ years in the USA I’ve experienced all kinds of rainstorms, including a memorable hailstorm while at a trade show in Atlanta which dumped inches of hail in a matter of minutes and left the streets flooded. Nor’easters, hurricanes, ice storms….
But today in California has left me feeling soggy through and through. The Pacific Ocean has simply dumped on the continental coastline. We’ve had a couple of inches in Carmel Valley, but just north of us a town got 6.5 inches in less than 12 hours. Streams everywhere are flooding; Interstate 5 in Northern California is closed by snow….
So lay off England, please. We will gladly cede top spot in the rainfall rankings to the USA. And remember: those tightly-rolled British umbrellas are just for show.