a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
Here’s my Monday morning picture, from my airplane seat at about 6.45 am. There was fog at San Francisco airport which delayed us by an hour, but we made it in fine (with no gremlins on the airplane engine right next to me*).
*Such as the gremlin making trouble for the airplane in ‘Nightmare at 20,000 ft’ in the Twilight Zone episode from 1963 and Twilight Zone, The Movie (1983).
It was dark when I settled into my seat at 15A, but by the time we were pushed back from the gate at Seatac airport, the sun was just coming up.
We’re in the final stretch of our project. We are fixing defects and making functionality improvements for the pilot solution, and then the final solution has to be rolled out to all of the rest of the target users. The next few weeks will be a busy time, since the full user group and the data conversions that support them is about ten times the size of the pilot user group and their data.
It was not too hard to get up very early for my 6.00 am flight out to California on Tuesday! .. since I was still more or less on Greenwich Time. But I needed a few cups of coffee to get me through the afternoon, of course.
I had to hustle a little this morning to get to gate Z69 for Seattle at Terminal Z at Frankfurt airport on time. Several little travel time breaks went against me, and at the airport the automated baggage check machine would not let me check two bags (grrr) and I had to flag an attendant down. The extra bag fee is €75 ($84), said she – and yikes! no, I’m not paying that, I said. We got that squared away when I remembered I had a card up my sleeve : a Gold Star Alliance card. They waive the fee for a second bag. The passport check and security check was still ahead, but I made it to the gate in good time. The flight headed out northwest, across Greenland, Canada and some 9 hours later, made its descent in the Pacific Northwest.
I am staying overnight in Frankfurt before my trip back to Seattle. I packed in one last walk and a shopping spree at the Galleria Kaufhof (nothing too expensive, just a few items), and squashed everything into my carry-on bag. Marriott allows me to check out late, and so I did, at 1.59 pm (I was to check-out by 2 pm). It’s not so easy to get from the hotel to Tegel Airport with public transportation, but I did it anyway. It’s ride a U-bahn ride on the U2, step over the the U12, and get out at Zoologischer Garten. From there, there is an express bus to the airport – except it was a little late today (so even in Germany buses run late sometimes). I had plenty of time at the airport, though.
Here are some of my favorite pictures from all the places I checked into and checked out around the center of Berlin.
I made it into Berlin’s Tegel airport in the afternoon. I dawdled a little getting out of the airport, taking my time to take the scenery in. Berlin’s new Brandenburg airport is under construction (years late and billions of euros over budget. So little Tegel airport with its hexagonal main building around an open square that Berliners have become very fond of, will be closed, but probably not before 2018. Walking distances are extremely short at the airport. Our baggage claim was RIGHT THERE at the entrance into the terminal as we stepped off the plane. And another 30 meters puts you outside the terminal where the taxis and buses are (no S-bahn or U-bahn train to take directly from the airport).
My time in South Africa was up on Tuesday, and I headed out to Cape Town International airport by noon to return my rental car. I was on South African Airways, a code share with Lufthansa. We stopped in Johannesburg, and then on Tuesday night went on to Frankfurt. I will stay over a few days in Germany before heading home to Seattle, and plan to go to Berlin for a day or two.
I drove out to Somerset West today to meet up with old friends there. I had some time to spare beforehand, and stopped at the beach at Strand. (Check out the pink area in the map from Saturday’s post to see where these are). A few dozen people were out for a walk on the beach, and two hardy souls even braved the cold water. (The Strand’s water is rarely on the warmer side, since the cold sea current from the West Coast usually prevails. But once in a while the water temperature would be very pleasant).
Stellenbosch is South Africa’s second oldest European settlement (after Cape Town), founded in 1679 by then-Governor of the Cape, Simon van der Stel. Stellenbosch means ‘(Van der) Stel’s Forest. Stellenbosch University was founded in 1866. Its logo has a little oak leaf in it, a nod to the nickname for Stellenbosch, ‘City of Oaks’.
My friend Marlien and I drove out to the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront today. The enormous V&A Waterfront shopping mall has too many shops to even count – clothing stores, book stores, home and kitchen gadgets, music, African artwork – anything under the sun. Outside one can take a helicopter ‘flip’ (short ride of 10-15 mins, about US$300 per person), take a harbor tour, or go out to a Robben Island excursion. We just took it easy and took in the sights, and bought a little souvenir here and there.
I made the long journey south (10 hours) from Frankfurt to Johannesburg on Sunday night in a big A380-800*, and then took a 2-hour flight on South African Airways to Cape Town from Johannesburg. At our arrival in Jo’burg we were all heat scanned by a camera, for fever/ Ebola symptoms, said the sign.
*I sat all the way back in row 96G, in a little coach section tucked upstairs into the tail of the A380. It made us forget we were flying in an enormous airplane, but the seats were not particularly comfortable, nor spacious, of course. The other problem was that my luggage took a long long time to come out in Johannesburg (the fault of the big airplane or slow baggage service? both?) : some 45 minutes. So I had to make a run for my connection to Cape Town.
Friday brought cooler temperatures and a little rain late in the afternoon as well. The Altstadt (old city) in the historic heart of Frankfurt is undergoing a lot of new construction here. At least the Römerberg square is now nicely cleaned up (it was not when I checked it out a few years ago).
(Thursday night USA time, Friday morning Frankfurt time). Well, I made it in. I had fantasies of open seats remaining open next to mine as I checked in on-line and selected my seat for the flight, but none of those came true : the flight to Frankfurt was packed. Mostly German and Dutch peeps returning home, from what I could tell. A Flemish-speaking family near me (I inadvertently eavesdropped on them) was going home to Brussels. It was was warm today here in Frankfurt and I was sweating as I walked the short distance for the Festhalle/ Messe U-bahn stop to the Marriott hotel !
My bags are packed. I am leaving for Frankfurt in the morning. This is part of my trip to South Africa. I have checked in on-line; I have my Frankfurt Metro app on my iPhone, and I have some left-over Euros from previous trips. (Yes, I have my passport. Without Mr Passport in one’s pocket, the journey will not even start !). It’s a 747 we will be flying in, and the flight time is about 9 hrs.
We spent some time today at Tide Park beach – part of the larger Solana Beach area to the north of the San Diego metro area. I even dipped my toes into the California surfer culture by going out on a standing-up paddle board for a bit, with some coaching from my brother. The surfing area by the beach is called ‘Table Tops’ because of a reef right there. Absolute beginners such as me were wise to steer completely clear of the surfers, of course.
I traveled to San Diego on Friday afternoon for a weekend visit to my brother and his family. We went to dinner in the Little Italy neighborhood in San Diego downtown. Afterwards we strolled around the waterfront on North San Diego Bay.
It was a long haul back from Kettleman City to LAX International Airport. I dropped off the rental car without refueling it since I was cutting it close for making my flight. Then our Hertz rental car shuttle bus was packed, and the Alaska Airlines stop was the last one (of six stops! Man! Are the contractors done yet with that LAX Train/ Automated People Mover System as it is called?). I see the now-infamous LaGuardia airport in New York City (it opened in 1939) is finally going to get a $4 billion make-over with a high-speed ferry and train connections. Construction of the project’s first half is expected to start in 2016, with completion scheduled for 2021.
It was a scorcher .. the temperature in the outskirts of Kettleman City here in the sun-scorched Central Valley in California went up al the way to 110°F/ 43°C today. Here are pictures of the old-fashioned ‘Wild West’ storefronts along the main plaza in Kettleman.
