Category: Travel

Dottie from San Francisco, commenting on a New York Times article that mentions a few countries in Europe that Americans may be able to travel to, this summer:

‘After over a year of lockdown, I thought I’d be itching to travel but actually I feel the opposite. I’ve been working from home in practically solitary confinement, only broken up by daily walks in the park and weekly grocery trips, and it has made me anxious and stressed to be in crowds. I doubt I’d want to go anywhere after getting vaccinated.

Often I feel like a prisoner who’s been released back into society taking baby steps to do things that were once normal, routine. I haven’t eaten inside a restaurant in over a year. I can’t imagine getting on a plane and being surrounded by people. Let’s all hold off and wait until 2022, when most of the population at our destinations are vaccinated and we ourselves have acclimated back to normal daily living’.

My sentiments exactly, I’m afraid.

It’s spring break. In these times there should not even be a party, but this weekend young people travelled to Miami in the thousands, anyway. They crowded close together on the beaches, and in the streets on Ocean Drive, and then they brawled in the streets, and trashed some of the bars & restaurants.

‘Seemingly undeterred by the police presence on Sunday night in South Beach, two maskless men in their 20s, who were wearing board shorts and clutching hard seltzers, took turns snorting white lines from a postcard. Around the corner, a group of police officers stood calmly, talking with one another and shouting for people to go home.

A man who was part of a maskless throng of people walking toward Ocean Drive sipped from an almost empty bottle of cognac and nodded at the officers.

“I’m throwing it away,” he said, pointing into the distance. “It’s my birthday.”
“Hurry up, man,” one of the officers said, cautioning about a police detail nearby.
The officers stayed in place and continued their conversation as the group headed toward the bars that were now shuttered’.
– reported by Neil Vigdor, Michael Majchrowicz and Azi Paybarah in the New York Times

.. partygoers packed the Wuhan Maya Beach Water Park this weekend. Wuhan ended its 76-day lockdown in early April, and no new domestically-transmitted cases have been officially reported there since mid-May [Bloomberg Business News Quicktake on Twitter].

Kaunas is a city in south-central Lithuania at the confluence of the Neris and Nemunas rivers, with a population of about 300,000 people. Lithuania is one of the Baltic states, situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, to the southeast of Sweden and Denmark.

I discovered this bird’s eye view picture of the Pete Dye Challenge golf course (north of Rancho Mirage, in the greater Palm Springs area), in my scanned archives.
I took it from my seat in a propeller plane, during my very first visit to the United States, in March 1990.
My brother lived in nearby Palm Desert at the time. ‘Just so you know‘, he said, ‘Palm Springs and its golf courses are not what the real America looks like’.

March 1990: The Pete Dye Challenge golf course at Mission Hills Country Club north of Rancho Mirage, was completed in 1988.
The curved road at the bottom of picture is Dinah Shore Drive.
At the very top edge of the picture runs highway Interstate 10, going to Phoenix, AZ, and all the way east across the country to Jacksonville, FL.
The tracks of real estate in between the greens of the golf course would be developed soon enough ..

July 2020: Fast forward 30 years later to today, and we find the Pete Dye Challenge golf course temporarily closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Mission Hills North/ Gary Player Signature golf course was added in 1992.
The tracks of land have been filled up with houses/ golf course condominiums.
Rancho Mirage High School at the top left of the picture was founded in 2013.

Here’s another 4×6 ‘escape’ photo that I found on a lamp post, of the Gullfoss waterfall in Iceland.  It’s about 50 miles (80 km) as the crow flies from the capital of Reykjavik, and 75 miles (120 km) to drive out there with a car.

I found this picture of Prague on a lamp post here on 13th Ave.
Regrettably, I have not been the beautiful capital of the Czech Republic — at least not yet.
I had a chance to go there while I was working in Bratislava, Slovakia, in 2008. Bratislava is a 4 hour train ride away.

My flight on Japan Airlines was off to a late start (an hour delay), but after that everything went without a hitch.

There wasn’t an empty seat on the plane.

I’m at Narita airport, ready to board for my flight to Seattle.
It was 52 °F/ 11 °C and sunny in Tokyo today, so it was great to be outside and enjoy the sun.
I did get to see the inside of the new scarlet red Marunouchi Line train cars. It is really not much different, or more luxurious, than the older cars.

I had a nice nap on Wednesday morning to make up for the sleep I had lost on the red-eye flight from Perth to Tokyo, and then I went out for a bit.

It was rainy and  4 °C ( 39 °F) at my arrival at Tokyo’s Narita airport, and much the same when the Narita Express pulled into the 5th floor below Tokyo station.  I made it to the hotel OK, without getting too wet.

My time in Perth has come to an end, and so I am heading north, the way I came.

It’s 9½ hours to Tokyo, and I will stay over on Wednesday night.

I was in downtown Perth, and took the train to Fremantle today from there.
It takes about 30 minutes, and the train stops at 14 stations along the way.
To get back home to Bull Creek, there is no train: one has to take the bus.