Category: Travel

We’re off to California on Thursday for a family trip. In this case, “family” refers to both the travellers and the destinations. (Visitors and visitees?) There will be five of us, occupying most of one row of seats in a United 757 from Boston to San Francisco, ranging in age from 10 months to 55 years. We’ll be visiting grandparents in Carmel (actually great-grandparents with respect to Tommy), as well as Chris and his wife in Berkeley.
I wonder if Tommy will like listening to Channel 9….?

I’m at the Heathrow RCC waiting for them to call my flight. I’ll be back in Brookline by midnight, and in the office tomorrow.
It’s been a good trip. Good work-related meetings, a chance to walk the streets of London (a favourite pastime), spending time with my mother and brother, and a delightful couple of hours with an old friend of the family last night . (We sank a couple of pints at the Founders Arms on the South Bank, which lubricated a wide-ranging conversation.)
Apart from a brief snow flurry, I’ve dodged bad weather until today. Right now I’m watching planes taking off on runway 09R, and as each aircraft lifts off it’s squeezing great clouds out of the 100% humidity. Spectacular, especially the 747s and MD11s.
They’ve just called the flight (UA925). Time to go…

I’m heading over to England next Tuesday for a week. It’s mostly for family business, though I will be doing a few days work while I’m there. The reason is simple: United Airlines made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: round trip US-UK, no blackouts, ample capacity, Economy Plus seats, for just 35,000 frequent flier miles. OK, I have to pay $80 taxes and fees, and rent a car, but it’s still a great deal. Oxford (and London), here I come.
(Until just recently it seemed that whenever I tried to buy a ticket using frequent flier miles the system would always say “no seats available”, or “no Saver awards – full rate only”. It was bad for domestic flights; for international the chances were slim to none. Moreover there was no way to find out what seats were available: all you could do was guess a date, try it, and hope for the best. But in the last few months I’ve found that whatever I want seems to be available. And United has even started posting information about which routes and dates have good award ticket availability. What a concept!)

This morning I woke up at 4:30 AM here in the Embassy Suites hotel on Arcadia. (“Arcadia”! Sounds blissful, no?) I think this means I’m ready to head home. So I’m just finishing my packing; in a few minutes I’ll head down to get breakfast, and then I’ll check out and drive down to LAX for the final leg of my journey. Tonight, if all goes well, I’ll actually sleep in my own bed.
I was going to add a few notes about what I’d learned from this 23K mile odyssey, but perhaps I should wait until it’s complete!

If oversleeping is nightmare #1, a close runner up has to be losing a credit card. This morning I was having breakfast at a restaurant in Palo Alto, paid with my credit card (the one I use for much of my travel, with lots of accounts linked to it), and somehow the restaurant staff managed to lose it. I kept my cool; I gave them my name and cell phone number, and drove back to the hotel to start the process of cancelling the card. Just as I got there, the restaurant manager rang me to say they’d found it.
Not how I planned to spend Saturday morning – but at least I got a free breakfast out of it.

After a delayed flight from Prague (baggage loading, de-icing, then dense fog at Frankfurt) I’m back at the FRA Red Carpet Club for the third time on this trip. How did that movie “Groundhog Day” go again…? Anyway the next leg to DEN is the longest: about 11 hours, I think. I’m going to wander over to the gate and try to switch to a window seat on the right side of the plane: I want to get a good view of Greenland, and it’s easier if the sun isn’t in your eyes.
UPDATED: Well, actually it wasn’t the longest leg in flying time. FRA-DEN was just 9 hours 20 minutes; BLR-FRA took just over 10 hours. Several factors: FRA-DEN was close to a great circle, and headwinds were light. For BLR-FRA, we took an odd northerly route, rather than the direct path over Pakistan and Iran. And FRA-DEN was on a 747-400, which cruises quite a bit faster than the A340-300.

169 photos. That’s how many shots I took while exploring the heart of Prague today. Now I just have to upload them to my gallery – but I think I’ll wait until I have a better Internet connection available. There’s clearly something wrong when the front page of my blog (~400K including images) takes just 45 seconds to load on my cellphone and a whopping 3 minutes 40 seconds to load on my laptop connected via the so-called “high speed Internet access” here at the hotel.
High points:

• Crossing the Carluv most (Charles Bridge; note that I’m not going to attempt to include any of the Czech accents) in a freezing fog that made the cobblestones slippery but didn’t discourage hundreds of tourists and souvenir sellers
• The first souvenir shop on the east side of the bridge, where I bought a hooded sweatshirt (without which I wouldn’t have been able to keep going), and chatted with the staff for a while about Sun and the merits of different Linux distros
• Staromestske namesti, the Old Town Square. Simply stunning.
• An enormous cappucino at the Ebel coffee shop in Ungelt (the name means “no money”, intended to dissuade looters!)
• Josefov, the former Jewish ghetto
• Vaclavske namesti, a.k.a. Wenceslas Square , where I explored several bookshops as well as the local Marks & Spencer(!)
• Sunday brunch at the Restaurace “Sarah Bernhardt” in the Hotel Paris

After brunch I headed back to the Old Town Square and then across the Charles Bridge, intending to explore Prazsky hrad (Prague Castle) and the Hradcany district. But as I reached the Malostranske namesti, I suddenly realized that I’d reached my limit (in terms of energy and temperature), so I walked back to the Malostranska metro station and caught a train the two stops back to my hotel. A thoroughly satisfying 6 hours (and it felt longer, which I think is good).

I’m now at the Red Carpet Club at Frankfurt after a 10 hour haul from Bangalore. No real problems, lots of tedium. LH coach seats provide very little thigh support, and the food was crap. Yesterday’s meetings in Pune were very useful (and enjoyable).

I got a good 7 hours sleep last night, interrupted only by a phone call (and I didn’t pick it up in time). The bad news is tht the persistent tickle in my throat during the flights has turned into full blown laryngitis: my voice is distinctly limited. Oh well….
Went out shopping this AM. In theory this was to get to a pharmacy and stuff: in practice the driver always needs to stop at a friend’s craft (souvenir) shop. I played along and picked up a few things.
The city looks beautiful – very different from my last (soggy) visit.

Just checked in to my hotel in Bangalore. (Naturally the first thing to do was check Internet access.) It’s 1:37am local time; let’s see if I can get some sleep.
Flights were uneventful. Lufthansa is so 1990’s, though.