a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
I met my brother and nephew for lunch on Tuesday. We picked the swank Westin Hotel restaurant in the city’s Foreshore district. My nephew ordered a chocolate milkshake (not on the menu) to go with his lunch – and to their credit, they were up to it. ‘It will just take a little time’, said our server.
After I had dropped my friend Marlien at the airport on Sunday afternoon, I drove out to Camps Bay. There are two ways to get there from Cape Town : across the ‘neck’ of Table Mountain called Kloofnek (a kloof is a ravine), or along the Atlantic coastline through Greenpoint and Seapoint. I picked the Kloofnek road out there, and wanted to drive back along the coast, but found the late Sunday afternoon traffic too much, so I went back the same way I had come.
My friend Marlien and I ran out to the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront in Cape Town, the way we normally do when she visits me here. We did not stay too long, though : a blustery wind came up and made it unpleasant, and so we left early. I see my picture of the Enigma XK does not quite do it justice. Checking into it again later, I found out that it used to be a fisheries patrol vessel, but has been turned into a luxury expedition yacht ! I think that some of the spectacular pictures on the link were taken in Antarctica.
We made our 1 hr 20 min ‘hop’ from Frankfurt to Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport this morning, and then took the long south-bound flight (11 h 20 mins) to Cape Town. It was 10 pm local time at our arrival. As I got into my rental car and started driving, I kept telling myself to keep left ! keep left ! (Driving in South Africa is on the left hand side, same as in the UK). There’s a much larger risk that one would drive in the wrong direction late at night when the streets are deserted.
It’s 6.00 am on Tuesday morning here in Frankfurt and I am back at the airport, checked in for my trip to Cape Town with a stop in Paris. There is stepped up security in place, or at least for Paris. My hand luggage was searched thoroughly. (I’m all those chargers and cables for my gadgets make for an ugly image on the baggage scanner).
We left Seattle on time and traveled without incident. I sat next to a guy that told me he was on his way to Nuremberg in Bavaria to Adidas headquarters to talk to them about their e-commerce* efforts. Frankfurt was sunny and a decent 50°F/ 10°C at our arrival.
*A general term meaning the buying and selling of goods and services, or the transmitting of funds or data, over an electronic network, primarily the Internet. These business transactions occur either business-to-business, business-to-consumer, consumer-to-consumer or consumer-to-business.
It is time to start my journey to South Africa on Saturday morning. I’m making a stop in Frankfurt before picking up Air France there for Cape Town. I tried to generate a graphic itinerary in Google Maps but ended up drawing the flights in. Google only offers graphics for flights between one start point and one end point. As for driving, it offered a fascinating road trip from Paris to Cape Town : 172 hrs of drive time, with a ferry crossing across the Mediterranean, following the Trans-Sahara Highway through Algeria and Niger, and then another ferry to get across the mighty Congo River at Brazzaville. Now that would be a trip to remember.
I am planning a trip to South Africa in April, and so my nightly ‘game’ of scouring the connections to Cape Town on a variety of on-line travel booking sites (Expedia, Orbitz, Kayak) and the airline sites themselves had been going on for a while. First one has to find an itinerary with decent connections, and then it is a whole new ball of wax to figure out how to pay for it if you are Mr Frequent Flyer with several accounts with air miles in them.
So last night it was time to buy a ticket. BUY IT RIGHT NOW, I thought. The Europe connection to Cape Town is the hardest. It’s usually between London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt or Paris as a connecting city, to get me to Cape Town, and usually with a stop in Johannesburg. I found a direct Paris to Cape Town and was about to buy an Air France ticket on Expedia when I thought : let me log on to airfrance.com and see if I can use at least some miles to pay for the ticket. Hmm. A pitiful 3,000 miles on my Flying Blue account. Maybe I can transfer in miles from my American Express Membership Awards account. Yes. 60,000 miles available to transfer. Great. For a business class seat in, and a premium economy back, I still needed 57,000 more. Man. Let’s see what happens when I try to pay with partly miles, and partly dollars.. voila! Air France let me buy extra miles at the bargain rate of €1.10/ dollar .. and they have a sale until March 18. They throw in an extra 50% miles in addition to the ones you buy. So buying 38,000 got me 19,000 for free. So : all told, an almost business class return fare for US$1,100. Not bad at all. That kind of fare on the open market goes for at least $6,000 and Nelson Rockefeller I am not! (Of course : it took several years to rack up the American Express miles that I now burnt up in one go. But hey, that’s what they are there for).
I got to go home on Wednesday, and I drove out to San Francisco airport with the hope of getting onto an earlier flight. There was a 4.35 pm a 7.30 pm in addition to the confirmed seat I had on the 8.30 pm. No 3 on the stand-by list for the 4.35 pm was not good enough, but I made it into a middle seat on the 7.30 pm : an acceptable trade-off for my window seat on the 8.30.
I picked up my rental car again today and drove up on 
Highway 101 from the airport through the city and onto Broadway. Man! There are plenty of one-way streets, stop signs, bus only and bike only lanes, and pedestrians to watch out for. Once I reached Broadway, I told myself : park the car now; you cannot ogle at everything and drive at the same time. I was shocked to actually find a parking space, but I did, and I could walk around a bit to explore Broadway and a few blocks close by.
We completed our work session late afternoon, and we have another one early Monday morning, so it was hardly worth for me to fly back home for a very short weekend. And so I’m staying over in the City. I took the rental car back to Hertz, and I took the train into the city. (I will pick up the rental car again on Sunday).
I am staying in a Marriott close to Union Square. There was a little drizzly rain in the air as I went out for a walk, but barely enough to make the streets and pavements wet.
I took BART out to San Francisco to spend the day at my firm’s office in the Embarcadero. The Ferry Terminal is close by, and it was warm enough to enjoy the cool air and sunshine by the waterside during lunch.
I ignored Saturday’s baffling and crazy mass shooting in Kalamazoo, Michigan* and ordered an Uber driver nonetheless, to get me to the airport today. The driver was fine, but I really should take the train next time. We got completely stuck in traffic for 15 minutes even before we got to Interstate 5.
*Uber is a popular online taxi dispatch company (rides are ordered with a smart-phone app). Uber does vet its drivers and does background checks on them. During Saturday night in Kalamazoo, a forty-something Uber driver – a dad with two kids, no criminal record – shot eight people in cold blood at three locations, for no apparent reason whatsoever. Six people dead. He was found and stopped after seven hours. He really had no explanation to offer for his actions at his arraignment today.
It was a short trip to California this week, but I was still glad when it was time to jump into my little Prius compact car and drive south to Sacramento airport. Man! but there was so little air traffic at the airport : all of three planes in sight at the twenty or so gates at Terminal B. One from Southwest Airlines, and two from Alaska Airlines.
I traveled to Sacramento airport on Tuesday, and drove out to Chico, an hour and forty minutes to its north.
Our project is winding down. We are bringing our last group of users into the system that we had built for them. We’re also steering clear of the Bay Area this week. Air fare and hotel prices are through the roof with the upcoming Superbowl 50 that is hosted by Santa Clara.at the south end of the Bay.
P.S. Hillary Clinton won the Democratic caucus in Iowa with a razor-thin 49.9% share of the votes, over 49.6% for Bernie Sanders.
I’m home, with all my ‘belonging’ !
I made it into Seattle-Tacoma airport at 5 pm local time.
(So I arrived at 5 pm in Seattle on Saturday after departing at 9.45 pm on Saturday in Tokyo, the result of flying east across the International Dateline. I got the 24 hrs back that I lost when I traveled out in the opposite direction).
My connection in Vancouver was again a little tight, but once more it helped that Canadian customs and baggage claim there were very efficient. Vancouver airport actually does Canadian arrival and USA entry processing right there, so that Vancouver-Seattle passengers do not have to go through United States customs upon arrival in Seattle.
I arrived at my fancy hotel on Friday night. (Decided I need to ‘upgrade’ my hotel that I had coming in. The Prince Sakura Tower Hotel is a special ‘autograph collection’ Marriott Hotel, and I used Marriott Points so that I did not have to pay $400 for a night’s stay!). I packed it in today, spending most of the time I had in Akihabara and Shinjuku, and now I am at Haneda airport waiting for my flight to Vancouver.
I’m in Hong Kong, waiting for my flight to Tokyo. We got pushed back from the gate at Perth airport just about at midnight, and arrived in Hong Kong shortly after 7 am this morning. Happy New Year!
We stopped at Cottesloe Beach today for coffee and a bite to eat before we went down to the beach for a quick swim.
Cottesloe Beach is where Prince Charles got accosted and kissed on the cheek by admirer and model Jane Priest in 1979.
Prince Charles returned there this November for a beachside barbecue for his 67th birthday celebration, and as part of a 12-day visit to Australia and New Zealand.
(The celebrations came to an abrupt end after an unexpected thunderstorm sent guests running for cover as they sung him happy birthday, reported the website WAtoday, here).
Here are pictures from my random walk around Perth downtown on Tuesday. The train ride from Bull Creek Station here in the southern burbs to the Perth downtown station is just 11 minutes.
