Alaska Airlines made me sweat a little by being 30 mins late with the short hop up to Vancouver. (Can we leave already? How about NOW?). Our Bombardier arrived late, and then there was a snafu with transmitting the load balancing numbers to the pilot. (It was printed and brought out to the plane). But the Canadian customs process and baggage claim was very efficient (they have scanning machines now for the customs declaration for US passport holders), and I even had a little time to spare to catch my flight out to Tokyo.
Here we are walking up to board our Bombardier Q400 propeller jet place, bound for Vancouver.Canada has maple leafs and moose, says the Starbucks coffee mug (and a Royal Canadian Mounted Police ‘Mounties’ hat) on the far right.This is not a polar bear : it is a Kermode bear (also called a ‘spirit bear’ ), and actually a subspecies of the North American black bear. About 1 in 10 of the bears in the population have a cream or a white coat.
Today was my last workday for 2015. I am heading out on my end-of-year trip in the morning : down south to the Land of Oz (Australia). It is going to start with a short hop up to Vancouver to catch a flight to Tokyo. I will spend two days there before continuing on to Perth with a stop in Hong Kong.
I drove back to Sacramento airport on Thursday, taking Highway 99 (it runs through Chico). I would have loved to spend more time walking around Chico, or even to stop in Sacramento, but there just was no time for that. The airport is north of the city of Sacramento, so I did not get to see any of the California capital. Maybe next time!
The Madison Bear Garden is a sports bar and eatery in a historic building. The California State University of Chico campus is close by. A lot of the local economy is tied to CSU in Chico.This is the Bidwell Presbyterian Church.The Chico Museum is close by. The City of Chico was founded in 1860 by John Bidwell, a member of one of the first wagon trains to reach California in 1843. Chico was home to a significant Chinese American community when it was first incorporated, but arsonists burned Chico’s Chinatown in February 1886, driving Chinese Americans out of town [Source : Wikipedia].Another church with interesting stained glass windows. I did not write down the name.
Back at Sacramento Airport, and this time I could take a close-up picture of the giant silly wed wabbit.
We walked by the substation to the Substation to get a sandwich for lunch today. Inside they played ’80s music : Come On Eileen (Dexy’s Midnight Runners, 1983) and Tainted Love (Soft Cell, 1981). The guy behind the counter inquired ‘Which part of the Empire are you from?’ as soon as I placed my order. I should have said the Galactic Empire* but instead said ‘South Africa, but I now live in Seattle‘. Ah, and you speak Afrikaner (sic)?. Yes yes, I said, my native language is Afrikaans.
*A Star Wars reference
Here’s the substation that serves up low-voltage electricity .... and here is the Sub Station that serves up sub sandwiches.
We had a very long day at work, but made time afterwards to stop by the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company here in Chico for some brewski and a bite to eat.
Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. was established in 1979 by homebrewers Ken Grossman and Paul Camusi in Chico.A view of the brewery from the restaurant next door. Adding more hops to the brew, perhaps?Inside the restaurant next to the brewery. Lots of beers to choose from, and I love the mountain lion on the stained glass artwork.
I drove up north toward Chico, after arriving at Sacramento airport. This 10 ft tall standing trumpet is by gate B15.There are two reflections of me in the picture (white shirt and gray pants).This giant leaping red rabbit is 56 ft long and 15 ft high. It was made by Denver artist Lawrence Argent, from steel and aluminum and cost a whopping $767,000.
Here are some pictures of my arrival at Sacramento airport. The airport is not nearly as big as San Francisco International or the sprawling LAX (Los Angeles) airport, but I the Terminal B where I had arrived is practically brand-spanking new (it opened in 2011). The $1 billion terminal contains $6 million of public art. Its construction created some 2,400 jobs over 2 1/2 years during a recession that had left state and regional unemployment hovering around 12 percent.
I had a late night flight out of Seattle to San Francisco on Sunday night. Freezing fog conditions made for an even later departure, though. Our scheduled departure was pushed back so much that it was 1.15 am by the time I picked up the rental car at San Francisco airport. Luckily the little ‘air train’ out to Hertz still runs at that time, and the rental car facility operates around the clock. And hey : there is almost no traffic on the Bay Bridge in the dead of night.
Here comes the de-icing truck. The operator at the end of the hydraulic boom directs the de-icing fluid to the proper places on the wings.
I think all travelers – and especially those of us traveling internationally – are scratching our heads a little, as to what to make of the ‘Worldwide Travel Alert’, issued on Monday by the US State Department. I am more or less always careful when I travel overseas, and I don’t advertise my nationality. (But make no mistake : I am sure I do stick out like a sore thumb with my gigantic Canon camera and its frequent use to take pictures, when I travel. Ah well). I have been fortunate in that the worst that has happened over many years of travel is the surreptitious stealing of my wallet from my backpack in Hong Kong. On a different occasion a customs agent in Lagos airport that took my passport, and then could not find it when returned as instructed with my luggage, to get it back. (They found my passport after 20 mins in a desk drawer).
I spent some time in Salinas this morning, and then drove up on Highway 101 by San Jose, Palo Alto and Mountain View up north to SFO International Airport to catch my flight to Seattle. Here is a picture of San Francisco Bay shortly after our take-off from the airport.
At the bottom left is the city of Oakland, connected to the city of San Francisco with the Bay Bridge (that crosses Yerba Buena and Treasure Island). The Embarcadero is where the Bay Bridge comes in. Up where the Bay connects with the Pacific, in that opening, is the Golden Gate Bridge .. but try as I may I can just not make it out on the picture! It is just too far away in the distance and shrouded in the dark.
It was Veterans Day here in the USA, and we are saluted our war veterans around the country. I had time this afternoon to go check out the Monterey waterfront and walk up to Cannery Row and the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
Here’s a view from the hiking/ biking trail that runs along the Monterey waterfront.The Monterey Canning Company .. one of several now-defunct sardine canning factories. The last cannery closed in 1973.Another touristy street scene in Cannery Row, the waterfront street where the sardine canning factories were located.Here’s the Cannery Row Beer Brewing Company’s brick building.This is the view from the public viewing deck on the outside of Monterey Bay Aquarium.John Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. Born in Salinas, he wrote about the Dustbowl and the Depression. His major works were ‘In Dubious Battle’, ‘Of Mice and Men’, ‘The Grapes of Wrath’, ‘East of Eden’, and ‘Travels with Charley’.Here is a serene Monterey Bay bathed in pinks and blues around 5 o’clock this afternoon as the sun was setting.
I’m staying in Monterey, but did not have a lot of time to look around on Tuesday. (I hope to have more time on Wednesday). I chose to drive up to Salinas via Pacific Coast Highway (the locals just called it ‘PCH’), also called California State Route 1 or simply Highway 1.
The drive took me through Castroville, that bills itself as ‘the artichoke center of the world’.
Here’s a beach scene at Marina State Park, just north of Monterey. The sand was still soggy from the rains on Monday.This is in old downtown Monterey, the facade of the Golden State Theater.
I packed my bags on Sunday and traveled out on Monday morning. I was not going to the project office though. We now have users in the field that have started to use our system, so I drove down to Salinas after arriving at San Francisco airport.
It was very wet at San Francisco airport, and it rained all the way during my drive down to Salinas as well.
It was still very dark we got settled into our seats on the way to San Francisco this morning at 6.30 am.
A little geography test for my readers (of the stops on my trip in December)! Let me help: The red dots are Vancouver, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Perth.
I have been scouring the internet’s travel search engines (Expedia, Orbitz, airline code share options such as ‘One World’) for many weeks now for a planned Christmas trip to my family in Perth, Australia – and am happy to report that I finally made a booking. Given that I have to fly commercial – no limousine to pick me up for a direct flight in soft upholstery from Seattle to Perth – there are literally thousands of routes out there.
An obvious choice is Qantas out of Los Angeles to Sydney, and then west to Perth, but their coach fares start at $2,500 and man! 15 non-stop hours in coach .. I wanted to see what other options I might have. I really wanted to stop over in Tokyo if I could, and for a long time I braced myself to buy a $3,000 fare on All Nippon Airlines’s direct Seattle-Tokyo flight on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner (blowing away my whole fare budget right there), and try to use miles to get from there to Perth. I know Singapore Airlines stops in Singapore and then goes directly to Perth, but let me just check American Express one more time, I thought. The AmEx fares are usually expensive, but let me look. To my surprise I found a few business class tickets left on Cathay Pacific from Tokyo to Perth via Hong Kong, a really good deal for $2,600. So got that, and then the other surprise was that there were great fares on AmEx for All Nippon Airlines’s direct Vancouver-Tokyo flights. Done! I thought, go for it. Not that hard to get to Vancouver. I will go there the night before by train from Seattle.
My Monday started early, but our departure was delayed by a ground stop due to fog in San Francisco. I guess it was time .. we have gotten away with fog-free Monday mornings in San Francisco for too long, I guess.
Here’s San Francisco International airport after our arrival in the Alaska Air on the right. That’s an Etihad Airways from the United Arab Emirates on the far right, and a China Southern Airlines jet. I believe the new control tower in the far distance is complete and operational.
Thursday came as it always does, and I could head out to SFO and to get onto the Alaska Air flying machine to Seattle. I was dozing off when I thought I smelled ketchup .. is that ketchup? Why yes, the guy next to me was the culprit : slathering a hamburger he brought onto the plane with ketchup while watching The Incredible Hulk on his computer.
It’s nice to sit by the window : that way I can check out the watery landscapes as we approach Seattle (next time I will pick a seat a little further away from the wing and the engine, though!).
I’m about to step into the Alaska Airlines 737-900 for the flight to Seattle. If you’ve made it this far, you are GOOD TO GO! Yes, the flight can still be subject to an unexpected delay, but you can no longer miss your flight.
At 12 noon I got an automated notification from Alaska Airlines that my flight was delayed by 1h 20m, but then as the original departure time approached, they canceled the delay and changed it back to the original departure time! Luckily I a. noticed the new message* and b. still had enough time to make it out to the airport for the flight.
*I turned off almost all ‘push’ messages from the apps on my phone to try to stem the tsunami of messages. So no messages from New York Times or King5 news. No, I do not want to get updates about another mass shooting, this time at a community college in Oregon. What is there to say? A crazy guy with a gun that was way too easy to get/ that he should not have been able to get, shoots 10 people dead. Everyone is shocked. (Is everyone still shocked?).
It’s Monday but I don’t have an airplane picture to show. Check out the California sky from my hotel room as I checked in tonight. (Earlier than usual; usually it’s dark!). I had an isle seat on the plane and people squeezed in beside me before I could take a picture (how rude!). And a little later when I had my tray table down and notebook computer open and three other things on it, and then the window passenger needed to get out. So – ahem – bad timing with that request for me to get up – but hey, normally I welcome the opportunity to get up and stretch my legs. And we all know that ‘trapped’ feeling if you’re squished against the window and you have to go !
We’re No 4 for take-off on the runway at San Francisco International Airport this afternoon. (There’s a Virgin Atlantic jet that is about to take off, hidden behind the United jet).
It was a busy week and our work on the project is not nearly done for the week, but at least I got to go home on Thursday and work in Seattle on Friday. There was news of a terrible accident on the Aurora bridge in Seattle, though : a ‘Ride the Duck’ ‘amphibious’ tourist vehicle colliding with a bus, killing four international students and wounding many others. It was really an accident that involved two cars, one bus and one boat-on- wheels.
My travel for this week is a little different : it is Sunday night and I have already arrived in San Jose here in the south end of the Bay. I have to support a training session that starts at 8 am in the morning close by. No way to make it in to the airport AND drive out here in traffic that early! On the way here I saw streets called Technology Drive and Woz Way*.
*Nickname for Steve Wozniak, inventor, electronics engineer and computer programmer that single-handedly developed the 1976 Apple I, the computer that launched Apple (from Wikipedia).
It was rainy and a little windy when we left Seattle at around 6 pm.San Jose airport’s Terminal B has a giant pint of beer outside the Brit Bar. (The Brits just say pint when they mean a pint of beer, of course).The Marriott hotel that I’m staying in is right by the San Jose Convention Center.
