travel
- Jet lag is a weird thing. I’ve slept solidly the past two nights here in Germany but I’m still dog tired mid-morning and late afternoon. Coffee is only marginally helpful.
- One thing I love about Cologne is the number of bakeries with fresh bread and rolls easily available. A croissant and coffee for breakfast is just my speed.
- 18 people in my meeting today and only 4 women. Which, sadly, is still better representation than our industry overall. We should do better.
- I’m astonished by the number of people out and about to very late hours. 10 pm and it’s just twilight, restaurants all still going strong, lots of people hanging out along the river.
- Trips to Europe turn into opportunities to do two workdays - just as the workday here is ending, the one back home is cranking up. Lots of stuff popping back at the home office this week.
- I wish they did air conditioning better over here. It’s HOT.
- “Economy Comfort +” on an old Boeing 767-400 is kind of a joke. It’s still expensive and isn’t really comfortable.
- They have an abundance of beer house restaurants over here that are remarkably the same - get your choice of bratwurst, wiener schnitzel, or schwein haxe (pork knuckle) with potatoes and sauerkraut. They only serve one kind of beer, the house brand. It’d be kinda like choosing between the Budweiser Restaurant, the Miller Restaurant, and the Coors Restaurant, all of which served similar burgers and fries.
- So much beer, not enough water.
- That all being said, it’s kinda fun to order 1/2 meter of bratwurst at the restaurant.
- I just realized last night that I misplaced a meeting on my calendar for the fall, and since my wife has already scheduled around it, I’ll probably just need to miss the meeting. Oops.
- On the other hand, if I could keep that trip I might just make it to gold status with Delta for the first time. Two international trips this year and a bunch of domestic travel…
- Oof I’m tired. Where’s the coffee?
- I’m ready to be done with this head cold. Bleh.
- Normally on a business trip I’d be looking for a nice restaurant to hit for supper. Given that today is Valentine’s Day, I expect they’re all gonna be crazy busy tonight. I think I’ll hit the mall food court instead.
- Here’s hoping my 11-year-old remembers to give her mom the card I left with her.
- Oh and it’s Ash Wednesday. Thinking I’ll go to a service tonight.
- I can’t remember the last time I’ve really gotten into a new album. Probably when the Hamilton soundtrack came out a couple years ago. As a guy who used to be buying a new CD every month or so this seems sad.
- I gotta set myself a reminder that I’m leading worship this weekend… have everything planned but need to do some mental rehearsal.
- Pitchers and catchers report today. Looking forward to another good season for the Cubs!
- Before Hamilton, the last record I really fell in love with was Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs.
- Wordsmithing documents in a 20-person committee is quite an experience.
- Is it lunchtime yet?
- Sitting around doing nothing, by yourself, in an unfamiliar place is a lonely task. I was in tears missing my family on Monday morning when I saw that my 6-year-old had written me an IM overnight saying (her usual) “addie hi dad”. Hadn’t been that homesick since my first night at college.
- It’s a lot better when you can spend your days working. Feels like I have purpose and a good reason for coming over here.
- The people over here at our India Design Center are fantastic. Friendly, asking good questions, making me feel very welcome. I love it. I even got assigned my own office for the week!
- It was amusing to come in early this morning and see several folks decorating the cubicle of a co-worker for her birthday today. Balloons! Streamers! Some things are apparently the same everywhere.
- It’s kinda weird watching Monday Night Football on Tuesday morning while you’re getting ready for work.
- I’m not used to talking all day, every day. This trip is exhausting not just from doing all the teaching, but from being “on” all the time. I’m an introvert. This isn’t easy.
- I’ve watched Indian TV a little bit, but mostly now I’m leaving it off. It’s just too jarring and unfamiliar. Instead, I’m catching up on Seasons 1 and 2 of Breaking Bad.
- Half-way done with teaching now. Two more days of class, one day of meetings, and then I go home. Can’t wait.
- Having a hotel car pick you up from the airport is the way to go. Indian road markings, signs, and signals are suggestions as best. Traffic negotiation appears to be done primarily with horns and flashing headlights.
- Didn’t see much of Mumbai - arrived and left when it was still dark - but the airport was gloomy and damp. As was the hotel.
- The difference between Mumbai and Hyderabad was stark. The Hyderabad airport is a lot newer and more modern, and it’s clear that Hyderabad has put in, and continues to put in significant effort into modernizing. It appears that they want to be known as the tech-friendly, environmentally-conscious city.
- There were people out along the major freeway in Hyderabad this morning planting hundreds of little trees to line the roadway. Which also meant lots of little piles of dirt in the right-hand lane and people standing in the road shoveling.
- The sheer number of people everywhere is overwhelming. Even at the hotel, in each public area they have a bazillion employees there to offer you assistance with every little thing. (A guy had to come out and spread a pool towel on the deck chair for me before I could sit down on it. I mean, come on.) For an introvert like me who likes to just figure things out on my own and be left alone, it’s exhausting.
- On that point, why doesn’t the hotel here have a comprehensive information book in the room? In the states, we’d have a book that gave all the details for the hotel, when the restaurants were open, amenities, etc. Here apparently I have to ask somebody. (See preceding point.) Once again: exhausting.
- After 48 hours of travel, I’ve gained an entire extra level of appreciation for Bill Murray’s world-weary role in Lost in Translation. What time/day is it again, anyway?
- 0715: Arrive at company facility at CR airport
- 0716: Announce myself and get name checked off on the manifest
- 0725: Walk out onto the tarmac and board the plane
- 0730: One of the pilots points out the emergency exits to me, the first-timer
- 0735: We take off. Once we climb out, we cruise at 36,000 feet and nearly 600 MPH
- 0840: Land in Wichita. Climb off the plane and walk across the street to the FAA office.
- 0900 - 1230: Meet with the FAA
- 1230: Walk back across the street to the airport
- 1245: Board the aircraft and take off again
- 1300: Eat a box lunch after we’re back up at 36,000 feet
- 1405: Land back in CR
- 1415: Get off the plane after being towed into the hangar
- 1435: Arrive back home
Family vacation recap: DC and NYC
I’m always a little hesitant to write about traveling while we’re still out on the trip, since it does put out there in public that our house is empty (even if we have people coming over multiple times a day to care for pets). But now that we’re back home, it’s worth a review of the past 9 days.
National History Day National Competition
Our youngest daughter, Katie, just finished her first year of high school. For the second year she competed in National History Day, where she researched a historical topic (this year: the codebreakers of Bletchley Park) and wrote and performed a 10-minute monologue on the topic. She took second at state this year, which qualified her for nationals. So, we took Katie and Anwyn to the DC area for the contest. (Laura is in Nebraska for the summer, working… we missed her!)
NHD nationals are hosted at the University of Maryland. We stayed in the dorms there for 4 nights, from which I draw two observations: 1) cafeteria food has improved a lot since I went to college; 2) I’m too old for dorm living. The days that Katie wasn’t competing we took the Metro down into DC and played tourist. I think the Museum of Natural History got the highest praise from our crew, though Katie was very excited to go to the International Spy Museum and see actual Enigma and Lorenz encoders after having researched them all year!
Katie’s performance went very well, but she didn’t make it into the top 10 to perform again in the finals. We opted out of the 4-hour award ceremony (so many categories! so many medals to hand out!) and headed down to Georgetown where she had a college visit scheduled. Three years ahead isn’t too early to start planning, I guess. The G’town campus is beautiful. Katie knows she’s gonna have to work hard if she wants to be able to make it into a school like that. I am confident that she will.
New York City
Friday morning we got in our rental car and drove up to Manhattan. I’m the only one of the family that had been to NYC before, so we decided a long weekend would be a good time. And it was. We visited museums and memorials, the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, did some shopping, ate too much good food, and one night Becky and I made a late night (for us old folks!) outing to the Blue Note to see Wynton Marsalis and his Future of Jazz Septet play. They were fantastic. We spent Sunday hanging out with some friends who came up from New Jersey, and had a great time wandering around Midtown and Central Park.
Monday morning I woke up to a notification that our 5pm flight out of LaGuardia was already delayed an hour. Thankfully I was able to get us rebooked on a flight that left a little earlier, took a more direct route home, and got us home an hour earlier than scheduled (and 2 hours earlier than we would have on the delayed flights!). It is very good to be home. Becky did the math and reported we walked more than 50 miles over the past nine days… there’s a reason my feet are sore. But it was a delightful family trip, and I’m very glad we were able to make it work this year.
A short note on Travel Planning
I have found myself, since returning home from Washington, DC in mid-December, without any travel on my calendar. Normally I travel a half-dozen times per year for work, meaning usually at any given point I’ve got something at least on the calendar. But right now? Nope.
That may be changing here in the next week or two, with a new possible travel destination for me: York, UK. Somehow I’ve been to Europe 8 or 9 times but never to the UK. I’d be happy to add it to my list!
Catching up with myself
In the past two weeks I’ve logged 13,000 miles in airplanes, 1500 miles in the car, and spent 9 nights out of 13 across four hotels and an Airbus A330 business class seat. I visited Köln, Germany and Washington, DC for work, and then road tripped to Rapid City, South Dakota, to pick up my oldest daughter from college.
Maybe sometimes travel is glamorous, but most of the time it’s just travel. It’s sure good to be home.
Bullet Points for a Wednesday Morning, German Edition
I’m on work travel this week, visiting Cologne, Germany. It’s my second visit to Cologne, which is a lovely European city. Random thoughts:
Bullet points for a Wednesday morning: travel edition
It’s grey outside and I’m on business travel all week. Bring on the bullet points!
I should've remembered this from last time...
This post serves simply as a reminder to myself that when a European immigration officer asks where I came from and then asks “by?” he doesn’t want to know what Iowa is near to - he wants to know what cities my flight connected through.
And he’ll get rather irritated if I don’t pick up on that quickly.
On the other hand, if he can say “By? By? By?” with a little more rhythm, he might have a future on an ‘N Sync reunion tour.
Cue the Vangelis soundtrack...
One of the enjoyable things about going on business trips to various locations is the chance to get to do some running in locations I don’t usually get to see. I love that running gives you a perspective on a place that you don’t get from just driving past in your car, and when you can get that perspective on someplace new, that’s a treat.
A couple of past favorites include a run around Washington, DC, and another one in Ottawa, Ontario with a short excursion into Quebec. Tonight, though, I got to do my best Chariots of Fire impression on the beach outside of Melbourne, Florida. Can’t beat the sound of waves crashing on the shore as accompianament for your run.
I had to cut the run short because it was getting dark fast, but it was a great run; will definitely have to hit the beach this way again on my next trip to Florida.
My India Trip, Days 7 and 8
OK, I’ve been back for almost two weeks now, I should finish up reporting on my India trip. At a minimum, I should describe my trip back home.
My itinerary to head back home started in Hyderabad, taking a Jet Airways (an Indian carrier) flight to Mumbai, then catching Delta back to Amsterdam, Atlanta, and finally Cedar Rapids. I had three and a half hours to make the transfer in Mumbai… that should be enough, right?
When I showed up to the Hyderabad airport, I had a small heart attack when the Jet Airways ticket agent told me that my seat had not been confirmed (even though my itinerary document said ‘confirmed’!) and that the plane was nearly full. I stood there and prayed as he made a phone call to see what could be done. Finally he did get me a seat - the last seat on the plane. Crisis #1 averted.
Made it through security and back to the terminal only to find that my flight had been delayed by 20 minutes. Suddenly I started getting more concerned about my connection. My concerns would end up being valid.
We finally got to Mumbai, where the process for transferring from the domestic to the international terminal is a bit involved. First you deplane and head down to baggage claim. You’ve gotta pick up your checked bag and carry it with you. Then you stand in line for a shuttle bus to go between terminals. That shuttle only runs once every 30 minutes. To actually get on the bus you have to go through security (again), running your bags through the x-ray and getting wanded by a guard. The bus was getting full and it was looking like I wasn’t going to fit. I pushed my way down the ramp and told the guy what time my flight was. He checked his watch, threw my bags underneath in the baggage compartment, and hustled me onto the already-full bus. Phew.
The ride to the terminal seemed to take forever. For what is no more than a 1-mile distance, I think the bus took 15 minutes to get there. We must’ve covered every inch of terminal. And the bus doesn’t drop you off any place convenient; it just stops by departure terminal entrance A. I needed to get to entrance D.
I hustled off the bus, grabbed my bags, and was helped out by one of the airport guys who works for tips. He asked my airline, grabbed one of my bags, and had me hustle with him down to entrance D. He got me to the end of the line and then asked for a tip. For $10, he said, he could get me through the lines. It ended up being the best $10 I spent on the trip.
With my $10 in his hand, he pushed to the front of the initial security line and shoved my passport and itinerary under the nose of the security officer. After getting waved along, we then rushed to the Delta counter. The Delta folks were asking if I was on the Amsterdam flight even before I could get to the counter. I shoved my passport at them, threw my checked bag on the belt, and within seconds they handed me back my boarding passes and passport and told me to run to the next line. Off I ran.
A Delta agent met me at that point and ran me up to security, cutting me nearly to the front of that line. After once again putting my bags through the x-ray and getting wanded, I then hustled off to the immigration line.
Maybe I’m just a naif, but I didn’t expect hundreds of people in the immigration line at midnight on a Friday night. Fortunately I was able to cut nearly to the front of the business class immigration line, joining four other Americans trying to make the same flight that I was. We picked the wrong immigration line, though. The guy checking our forms and passports was super-slow. The guy next to him was clearing 3 passengers for every 1 that cleared our line. But finally I cleared that line as well.
At that point the Delta agent pointed me in the direction of the gate and said “go”. So there I was, at this point just past the scheduled departure time for my flight, running down the Mumbai terminal at 1:00 AM. Made it to the gate, with gate agents waiting for us 5 to make the flight. Hustled down the jetway, only to have to go through security again, this time taking off my shoes. (I think I went through that screening a grand total of 5 times that Friday night. Crazy.)
Finally I was on the airplane, in my seat. Then it was just a nine-and-a-half hour flight to Amsterdam, a (more sane) transfer there, ten hours to Atlanta, a couple hours sitting there, and then two hours home.
If I do the India trip again, at a minimum I now know to schedule at least 5 hours for transfer between flights. I might also opt to fly Emirates Air, which goes from Hyderabad -> Dubai -> Chicago. (I do love the Delta miles, though…)
So that was my excitement on the trip home from India. I’ve got one more post percolating with some final thoughts, which hopefully I can write up soon.
India Trip, days 5 and 6
I think it’s a fair guess that I’ve never spent 4 days talking non-stop for 8 hours each day before. My throat is feeling the effects of it. Amazingly, I still have a voice.
Last night one of the managers of our Indian facility took me and another guy from Iowa out to do some shopping and then to a team dinner of Indian food at a nice hotel. The hotel restaurant was so full that they had our (long) table set up poolside by their indoor pool. I’m kicking myself now that I didn’t take a picture of it. The shopping shall go undescribed to maintain some sense of anticipation for those receiving gifts.
Tonight I took the hotel’s “free shuttle” to the nearby shopping mall to see what a western-style Indian shopping mall looked like. The “free shuttle” ended up being a three-wheeled motor rickshaw… quite an experience, even for just the mile between the hotel and the mall.
Tonight I have the joy of packing my bags in preparation for heading home. Tomorrow I check out, go to the office, then back to the hotel and start on my way home. I can’t wait.
Just for the record, here’s me after completing my fourth day of teaching.
India Trip, Days 3 and 4
Some thoughts from days 3 and 4 (Monday and Tuesday) of my India trip:
My trip to India, Day 1/2
I’m in Hyderabad, India this week for work. (I’ll be teaching a training class all week for the employees of our Indian office.) Rather than post this as a series of tweets that nobody is going to read because I’m 12 hours ahead of them, I’ll scatter my thoughts on the blog.
I left Cedar Rapids at 1pm Iowa time on Friday afternoon. From there I went through Detroit and Amsterdam to get to Mumbai. Overnighted in Mumbai, then caught an early flight to Hyderabad. Got to the hotel about 10:00 AM India time on Sunday, which is about midnight Saturday night/Sunday morning back home. 36 hours of travel. Oof. Business class is great, but it doesn’t make the flights any shorter.
OK, I just threw away 200 words of travel narrative because I was getting tired of it, and if I was, all of you will. Instead I’m gonna do bullet points.
So that’s days one and two of my India trip. I’ve got 45 minutes more to wait before the hotel restaurant opens and I can get some dinner to try to help reset my body clock. Then it’s off to dreamland, and the first of four full days of teaching classes tomorrow.
I am now spoiled to commercial air travel forever
Yesterday I traveled with five coworkers from Cedar Rapids, IA to Wichita, KS, to participate in our quarterly update meeting with the FAA.
Normally, commercial travel to Wichita from CR means taking a flight connecting through either Chicago O’Hare or Dallas-Fort Worth. For a Wednesday morning meeting you’d need to leave CR early afternoon on Tuesday, spend hours in airports, 3 - 4 hours actually flying, spend the night overnight in Wichita, then reverse the procedure on Wednesday afternoon to fly home, possibly making it home in early evening… assuming the weather is decent and all the flight connections happen.
To counter this massive hassle and resulting lack of productivity for several engineers, enter this fine little piece of hardware: the company Hawker 800 XP.
It’s fitted out nicely on the inside, too, similar to this:
Being able to fly on our company jet made our itinerary for the trip to Wichita run something like this:
It’s still stunning to me - we went down to Wichita, had a half-day meeting, came home, and didn’t even use the full workday.
I am now spoiled to commercial air travel forever.
Canadian Travels and Weird Internet Friends
This week business took me on my second-ever cross-the-border trip, once again to Canada, though this time to a part of Canada (Toronto) that felt much less alien then last time (Montreal). Something about them still speaking English in Ontario makes it a little more comfortable.
Anyhow, there wasn’t much time for sight-seeing as we sandwiched a day of customer meetings and round-trip travel into a 48-hour window, but I did get the chance to finally meet, in person, some “weird internet friends”: Dan, Laura, and Wally. First, a little photographic evidence, then, the narrative.
Dan and Laura:
Wally, Dan, and me:
It should come as no real surprise by now to anyone that reads this blog that I have a group of “weird internet friends”. We’ve had some visit in our home, and met up with others in Minneapolis, Nashville, Lincoln, and Charlotte. Each time I’ve found them to be decent, enjoyable people, and we’ve had great times visiting. I had a little extra anticipation this time, though; Dan and I had hit it off so well online that I figured our in-person meeting would either be brilliant or amazingly awkward.
This meeting fell into the brilliant category. Without minimizing my enjoyment of Wally’s company at all, I have to say that Dan and Laura felt less like new acquaintances and more like long-lost family. We had a fantastic time visiting, eating dinner, and drinking coffee far too late into the evening.
While it is a nearly 12-hour drive from Toronto to Cedar Rapids, I extended the invitation to Dan and Laura that I’d extend to any of my weird internet friends (and you know who you are) - any time you have a long weekend and want to come visit, we have a spare bedroom, an expandable dining room table, and all the excitement of Eastern Iowa for you to enjoy on your visit. Hope to see you soon.
Denver
OK, so bad travel plans notwithstanding, I made it to Denver on-time on Monday evening. Tuesday was spent in an all-day FAA DER Recurrent General Training class (boring), and today and Thursday I’m attending the National Software and Airborne Electronic Hardware Conference. It’s sponsored by the FAA and NASA Langley Research Center, and there are some really interesting topics if you’re into safety-critical airborne software. Which, I know, none of you reading this are. :-) So enough about the conference.
Haven’t really seen much of Denver yet, though I may atone for that this evening and travel about. I’ve just got too many things on my to-do list for this week. Sermon prep for Saturday, new Conversation Cafe website (now branded Topics On First - check it out! - but it’s still the beta version of the site), planning orders of service for the fall, updating church bylaws and membership covenants… so much to do, so little time.
Denver is a little bit frustrating, location-wise, because you think you’re in Colorado, there should be mountains… but there aren’t really any mountains in Denver. You can see them off in the distance, but they’re still too far away to get to without some more serious time driving than I’ll have. Oh well. Maybe one of these summers we can hit them for a vacation again.
Well, lunch hour is almost over so it’s time to head back to the conference. Good times.
its wisdom, who can measure?
Work necessitates that tomorrow I travel from Cedar Rapids to Denver to attend three days of FAA training. On the face of it, that doesn’t sound too bad, travel-wise. CID -> DEN is only a two-hour flight, and one US airline, when not eternally funding the estate of George Gershwin with its advertising budget, provides three daily non-stop flights from our fair city to the Mile-High.
But wait! This is no ordinary travel planning. This is corporate travel! Per the guidelines of our corporate travel policy (its wisdom, who can measure?) I have been routed on a different airline from Cedar Rapids first to Dallas-Fort Worth, and only then to Denver. For those scoring along at home, that’s 850 miles and two hours south-by-southwest to DFW, a 90-minute layover, then another 800 miles and two hours northwest from DFW to DEN. Which is quite obviously far superior to the 700 miles and two hours directly west from CID to DEN. To ice the proverbial cake, the forecast for both CID and DEN tomorrow calls for nothing but sunshine. DFW? 80% probability of thunderstorms.
Two years ago when I attended this training travel was a mess and I ended up driving through downtown Atlanta at midnight searching for my hotel; last year DFW gave me delays heading to New Orleans and I was trying to avoid the bayou and find my hotel after even The Big Easy had fallen asleep. Even with this year’s circuitous routing I am scheduled to arrive in Denver before 7 pm MDT, so it will take some serious delays if I am to achieve the three-peat. Still, with travel plans like this, anything is possible.
Washington Vacation 2008: The Wedding
After the beach we took a couple of days to travel up from Long Beach to Leavenworth. The stop in Yakima wasn’t really anything to write home about - Yakima is quite different from the other places in Washington we visited - dry, dusty, more desert than anything. But it was a good stopping-off point. Becky shot pictures from the moving van like a wild woman. She did get a rather nice one of Mount Rainier:
Also, on our way up to Leavenworth, the girls had fun throwing rocks into this little mountain stream:
Once we made it to Leavenworth, we had a great time with family and friends at the wedding. We stayed at the Riverdance Lodge, which you really must check out via their website to appreciate. It’s a ridiculously posh vacation home which happens to be right next door to the house that Andrew & Heather were borrowing for the wedding. So, our family rented it to stay for a couple days. Fantastic choice.
I’ve got a whole set of photos on Flickr from the rehearsal and before and after the wedding, and it’s really hard to decide which ones to show here, so I’ll just give you one of them and you can go visit the set. In this particular pic, Andrew and Heather were kinda bored during the photo shoot and gave me this little pose:
Such fun. There’s one more I’d post, but somehow I didn’t get it uploaded to Flickr yet. I’ll make a separate post for that one picture - how often can you say you have a guy relieving himself against a tree in the background of a wedding picture? :-)
The wedding was beautiful and went about as smoothly as any wedding I’ve ever been to. I played the piano, Ryan sang, Laura and Addie were beautiful flower girls. They also had a lot of fun dancing afterwards. What a fantastic time of celebration.
Washington Vacation 2008: The Beach
After arriving late on Monday and having vehicle difficulty, we took the new minivan out to the Washington coast to spend a couple of days at the beach. We encountered several of these signs along the way… not something we typically see back home in Iowa.
The three-hour drive to the appropriately-named Long Beach brought us from temperatures in the upper 70’s in the Seattle area to 60 degrees, fog, and 30 mph winds in Long Beach. Yowza! We were glad we had remembered to pack jackets. We stayed at the Lighthouse Oceanfront Resort as part of a little deal where I created them a new website. We had a two-bedroom condo that, when the fog was out, provided us a view of the Pacific from our deck. The girls had much fun on the beach even in the cold; Laura found a real live clam, which stayed real and live until it had set in our minivan for a day, at which point it became real and very ripe. To spend actual time in the water, though, we enjoyed the heated pool at the resort.
The second day we ventured out to check out one of the nearby lighthouses. We tried to figure out how to reach the lighthouse on Cape Disappointment, but couldn’t figure out which road to take. So instead we visited the North Head Lighthouse, and while we couldn’t tour it (no children under 7 allowed on the tour), we still had a nice little walk and got some nice pictures of the lighthouse and the coast. Apparently the North Head Lighthouse records some of the strongest winds along the Pacific coast. We didn’t quite blow away, but it was seriously breezy.
Having traveled to the coast, the one thing Becky really wanted to eat was seafood. We did a little research and tried out a couple of different places that appeared to be somewhat family-friendly and within our budget. My conclusion is that seafood places in tourist towns must plan to sell you overpriced seafood and then make up for it with terrible service. The first night we tried a place called Doogers, and while my food was decent, the server totally forgot to bring me the Diet Pepsi I ordered. Becky’s combination platter was completely missing one of its major elements, a fact which wasn’t brought to light until Becky decided to ask for help identifying each of the elements on the platter. They went ahead and cooked up a razor clam and brought it out to her at the end of the meal, but still, come on, folks. The second night we tried The Crab Pot, supposedly a local favorite since 1946. We thought that surely it would be an improvement over Doogers. No such luck. Higher prices, poorer food, and incredibly awful service.
Still, though, we found a local bakery that was fantastic, and overall very much enjoyed ourselves in Long Beach. It would have been fun to have another day to spend traipsing around, but our schedule called us to move on. Next up: Yakima, en route to Leavenworth.
Note: I’m putting all the pics from the trip in this set on Flickr. There are far more than what I’m going to post on the blog. Grandparents will want to visit the link to see all the pics. :-)
An apology of sorts
I had really intended to keep the blog up-to-date while on this vacation - after all, during the vacation I have even more to write about than I would otherwise. Sadly, though… well, maybe not so sadly, I’ve been vacationing rather than blogging. :-) I have been taking lots of pictures, though, so they’ll show up eventually, along with some thoughts.
Short summary, though: Andrew and Heather were married yesterday evening in a beautiful outdoor ceremony. The weather was fantastic, everything was well-organized and -executed, and the party afterward was a lot of fun. Now it’s Sunday morning and all of us who remain here are more than a little tired… but it was quite worth it.
More later, I promise.
The Flat Tire
A couple of pics of our minivan’s flat tire the other night. Less dramatic because the guys already had the van jacked up. The thing was totally flat.
In Seattle
Day 1 of our vacation finally brings us to Seattle. Our flights were only delayed a little - we arrived at SEA maybe 30 minutes after our scheduled arrival time. Our luggage came through intact. (Had we known that the minivan we are renting had built-in child seats, we could’ve saved ourselves one piece of luggage… but ah well.)
The girls handled the trip wonderfully. Addie was mostly excited about seeing all the airplanes - her little nose was pasted to the window as much as possible, though she had to be up on her knees to see out the plane window - she’s too short to see out otherwise! Laura’s greatest excitement came from seeing the mountains out the airplane window. She’s never been to the mountains before, and when she saw the snowcaps, she let out a loud whoop, and kept yelling “Mountains, Mommy, mountains!”
We got in our aforementioned minivan and headed the few miles to our hotel. I was thinking the van felt a little funny but wasn’t quite sure. When we got to the hotel, it was definitely feeling funny… and yep, there was a flat tire on the back. Ugh. As frustrating as it was to have rented a vehicle with a flat right off the lot, I must say that Alamo handled it pretty well - I called the local rental place, they told me that it’d be no charge since it was right off the lot, they forwarded me to roadside assistance who had somebody at my location within 45 minutes to put on the spare. Then I drove the van on the donut spare back to SEATAC to exchange it for a different van. That was an hour and a half I would have preferred not to waste, but hey, it’s done now.
Tomorrow we’re headed down to spend a couple days on the coast. Can’t wait.