Category: Travel

Off to Boston tonight: SEA-IAD-BOS, getting in around 10:15AM tomorrow. Home (BOS-DEN-SEA) on Monday evening. I hope Channel 9 is working…..

It’s 1:40am; I’ve just got back to my apartment in Seattle after flying LHR-ORD-SEA. Heathrow was a zoo, but not quite as bad as last time (55 minutes to check in, 35 minutes to get through security). We had strong headwinds all the way; both flights were 100% full, but at least I had aisle seats. Amusingly the Daylight Savings Time bug showed up in the airshow map software on the LHR-ORD leg. The display kept insisting that we were going to land at Chicago just after 4pm, even though the scheduled arrival time was after 5pm. As we taxiied in, a frustrated FA finally announced that “the local time is actually 5:20… the display is wrong.”
My next flight (to Reno) departs SEA in exactly 8 hours, so I figure I should be able to squeeze in 4 hours sleep… if I can actually persuade my body to sleep, of course! All this comes one day after I picked up my aunt from Weston-super-Mare to visit my mother at hospital in Oxford, and then drove her home again: total distance around 400 miles, in intermittent sleet, hail, bright sunshine, lashing rain, and gale-force crosswinds. It was a weird day…..

I’m scheduled to fly back to Boston tomorrow, booked on a 6:05am flight from Seattle which is supposed to connect with a 1:05pm flight from Chicago. The good news: United Airlines is doing a good job of keeping me informed. The bad news….
From: United@ualmessaging.com
To: geoff@...
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2007 23:17:33 -0600
Subject: United EasyUpdate
** UNITED AIRLINES FLIGHT UPDATE MESSAGE **
The following flight time has been revised:
Flight Number: 682
Departing From: Seattle Washington (SEA)
Traveling To: Chicago O'Hare (ORD)
Date: February 17
Gate: N6 (Gate is subject to change)
Estimated Departure Time: 6:45 a.m.
followed just four minutes later by:
Estimated Departure Time: 7:15 a.m.
I have a bad feeling about this trip. Let’s check…. OK, UA is saying that UA682 should arrive at ORD at 12:43 and park at gate B7, while UA534 should be leaving at 1:05pm from gate B9. Average taxi time at ORD is about 10 minutes….
UPDATE: We pulled up to the gate in Chicago at 12:57, and I could see my connecting flight two gates over, still loading baggage. But when I reached it, the doors were closed. Fortunately, there was another ORD-BOS flight at 2:00, and it was almost empty: I got an entire exit row to myself! So now I’m back in the Boston area for a week, and rediscovering the fine art of negotiating treacherous sheets of ice. Ah yes, New England winter….
There was an unusual “bonus feature” on the SEA-ORD leg. The captain wanted to explain exactly why the flight had been delayed (the crew had got in late from Denver the night before, and needed to wait until their legally-mandated rest period was complete), so when the in-flight movie finished, he announced that he was going to give a 20-minute tutorial on air traffic control on Channel 9. A bunch of passengers toggled their FA call buttons to indicate that they were interested, so he went ahead. He did a nice job, going through the entire sequence from clearance to pushback to taxi to take-off to departure to en-route to approach, with a little bit about how airways and radio fixes work. He let us listen in to a sequence of instructions from the en-route controller and then interpreted them for us. Quite a few people seemed to enjoy it, as did I; of course I didn’t hear anything I didn’t already know, but then I’m not exactly typical….

Did you miss me?

At this moment I’m sitting in seat 21A, coach L of the 11:45am train from King’s Cross to Edinburgh. It’s 2:57pm, and we’re just pulling out of Durham, so there’s still nearly two hours to go. Fortunately the train has free WiFi and there’s a decent meal service: I have a nice bottle of Lebanese red wine to go with the various snacks that keep appearing.

The flight from Seattle to Heathrow was delightfully uneventful; the Economy Plus section of the B777 on the ORD-LHR leg was almost empty. (Good for me, bad for United.) In a first for me I was carrying on all my bags, so I sailed through customs at Heathrow, caught the bus to Oxford, and made it there before sun-up.

I had a most enjoyable Thursday and Friday with my mother and brother in Oxford. (Friday was Lorna’s 91st birthday.) On Saturday, Alec Muffett came up and he and I spent a delightful time in Oxford. Covered Market, lunch at the King’s Arms, self-indulgence at Blackwell’s, dessert at the wonderful patisserie Maison Blanc, some shopping, and then back to Lorna’s.

This morning I set out to Edinburgh. I was booked on the 9:38 train from Oxford to Paddington, and some deep-seated skepticism made me catch an earlier bus and get to the station just after 9. At 9:15 they announced that the 9:38 train was cancelled. Almost immediately, they informed us that the train at Platform 3 was the 9:05(!) to London. There was a moment of chaos as all of the passengers who were booked on the 9:38 (including yours truly) dashed towards the 9:05….. Fortunately I arrived at Paddington in plenty of time to catch a Circle Line train to King’s Cross and I boarded the 11:45 train to Edinburgh at 11:30.

We’ve just arrived at Newcastle station. I haven’t been here since 1976. Back in the 1970s I was a post-grad student at the University of Newcastle-on-Tyne, and between 1973 and 1976 I would regularly travel between Newcastle and London. Since then I’ve never returned; even today, I’m only passing through. How strange.

So here I am at Denver airport, coming up on 11 PM. My next flight to Boston doesn’t leave until midnight. Meanwhile – I’m starving! Like a fool, I didn’t eat at SeaTac because it felt too early. I never imagined that by the time I reached Denver every single food outlet would be closed. If they are going to eliminate food service on planes, surely they should make sure that passengers can actually buy food at the airport!
And that’s all I can blog: this browser limits text field size…..

Tomorrow (Thursday) I’m heading back to the Boston area for the first time since I moved to Seattle. I’ll be taking a red-eye through Denver, arriving at 5:40 on Friday morning, and returning via Chicago on Monday evening.
This will also be my first flight since “gel hysteria” hit the airways. (Also known as “The Official TSA Program To Prevent Chemically Impossible Attacks“.) I plan to travel extraordinarily light: camera, iPod, and cellphone (plus chargers), and a copy of Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys. I’m pretty sure I left enough clothes back in Brookline to get me through the weekend… at least, I hope I did!

Today I discovered one of the most beautiful places in Seattle: the Japanese Garden in the Arboretum. It’s “a 3 1/2 acre formal garden designed and constructed under the supervision of world-renowned Japanese garden designer Juki Iida in 1960.” Only one thing went wrong: I left my camera back at my office, so no pictures. But I’ll return soon. In fact I was toying with the idea of visiting it once a month, to record the seasonal changes. (Yes, I know: that sounds far too organized for me. We’ll see.)

I’m off to Seattle tomorrow, just for a couple of days. I’m looking forward to seeing several old friends, including a former colleague from SunLabs.

Regular readers will remember my blogging about the gestalt of traffic in India. Now Mark has drawn my attention to a delightful video that provides a bird’s-eye view of the whole thing.

We’re down on Cape Cod for a long weekend. We own a week at a time-share condo in Brewster that usually coincides with mid-term school holidays; this year it also includes Easter. Surprisingly things are really quiet here: we drove down yesterday, and the traffic was light all the way. Today we visited “P’town” (Provincetown): we zoomed up Route 6 at the speed limit with hardly any other traffic in sight. When we got there at 11am it was still foggy, but it burned off within an hour. By the time we left late in the afternoon, the number of visitors was looking more respectable, and a drag queen diva with a karaoke machine was drawing a good crowd in the town centre.
Monday is the day of the Boston Marathon, which passes through Brookline; it’s a good day to be out of town. We plan to stay here until Tuesday morning and then head back quite early.