Chris​Hubbs​.com

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.

• 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?

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.

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. :-)

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.

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.