a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
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.
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.
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’.
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.
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.
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.
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 !
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).
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.
