Category: Travel

It’s Monday, and it’s the already end of March in 2014.  Time flies !

Here’s what happens when you stay at the same hotel 3 or 4 nights every week : you become a ‘Diamond’ member in six months or so.  (Or ‘Platinum’ – it depends on the hotel chain).  The membership cards arrived in quick succession from the Hilton, each promising more exciting travel experiences.   Or the frequent traveler can get an upgrade to a nicer room, or stay for a few more free nights at any property of the hotel.    I see Conde Nast says there was a major program devaluation in March, so Hilton points don’t go nearly as far as they used to.   Oh well.  So there’s a little less of a free thing.   And if you travel year-round, the nicest vacation is staying put right at home.

‘Capitol Hill, Olive Way Exit, please’  is what I tell the little Prius Yellow Cab driver every Thursday night when I get into the taxi at Seattle airport.  (It’s the exit to take from Interstate 5 to get to Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood). We arrived late again last night – we departed late – and by the time the taxi pulled up at my house it was exactly midnight.  The front porch light that I had left on on Monday morning, was out, I noticed. I have to replace the bulb.   And there was something lying in the street .. oh, a paperback. I picked it up and brought it into the house.  So now I will have to read it, right?  It’s ‘Never Let Me Go’ from Kazuo Ishiguro. One review of the book says the writer poses the fundamental question ‘What makes us human?’ in the book. Hmm.  And I thought we were all computers. (Just kidding!).

Colfax Avenue (named for Schuyler Colfax, 17th Vice President of the United States from 1869–1873), is the main street that runs east-west through the Denver-Aurora metropolitan area here in Colorado. As U.S. Highway 40, it was one of two principal highways serving Denver before the Interstate Highway System was constructed.

Thursday night’s usual 2-hour trip back home turned into a 6 hr affair.  Our incoming aircraft from Portland, Oregon was already more than an hour late.  But there we were eventually, all settled in, with me in 10C.  That’s in Economy Plus.  The first six rows are the big Business Class seats.  That’s when there was a commotion going on in up there in Row 6, and it was some time that the pilot announced that a passenger got ill and threw up*, and that a cleaning services crew was on the way.

*He has my sympathies, the poor guy.  I know what it feels like to be sitting their, in bad shape, just from two weeks ago with my painful ear.

Man! That clean-up took a long time.  The original 7.45 to 8.50 pm delayed departure was now approaching 10.00 pm.  Some passengers with only carry-on luggage took their stuff out of the overhead bins, and disembarked.  (I was surprised that they were allowed to).   Apparently the last flight out to Seattle scheduled for 10.00 pm still had seats. This worked for them until the flight attendant announced that that flight is now also full.  Alright, anyway, we all thought. What’s happening with us? Good to go? Well, no. Someone (not the pilot) came and inspected the seats and floor and declared that the cleaning crew had to come back and dry the wet areas properly.   It was about 10.30 pm when we finally were pushed back from the gate, and everything went without incident from there – which I am always grateful for.  We arrived at 11.53 pm Seattle time (12.53 am Denver time). I was so happy to be able to go home!   As for the airplane, it had yet another flight scheduled for it – to Alaska, I think.  Patiently waiting for us at the gate to clear out, was this group of Alaska-bound passengers.

I couldn’t check the news all day long, and thought all day surely by tonight, some debris of the MH370 flight would be found, but no.   All we have are inconclusive satellite images of .. something, on the water’s surface.  The images were more or less from the ‘right’ area, published by a Chinese satellite company, but really does not show a whole lot.  I’m going to bed.  Tomorrow is another day.

I was not in great shape for flying home on Thursday : had a scratchy throat and runny nose.  But my sinuses felt very clear and I didn’t feel too bad (always a relative term).  Even so, there I was, sitting in seat 12D on the full plane as we pushed back from the gate, thinking ‘What have you done? What if your ears cannot handle the flight?  Well, it’s too late now! ‘.  So going up actually felt fine, but it seems to me coming down to land is harder on one’s ears.  I felt one or two stings as my eardrums adjusted to the air pressure .. and I was very happy when we finally touched down.   Yay! We made it!  I made it!

 

The blue-sky weather of Monday had gone by today.  By early evening, the winter chills from the North Pole refrigerator pushed the temperatures here down to 12 ºF (-11 ºC).  I could still make it to the hotel with my woolen hat, scarf and gloves.  But if that +12  ºF were to go to -12 ºF (-24  ºC), all bets would be off !

We are approaching the end of Cycle 1 on our project.  There are 4 cycles on our plan, each progressively building out and testing bigger chunks of the solution we are deploying.  We had a team dinner scheduled for tomorrow night, but (mercifully) that got canceled.  Yes! I thought, when the cancellation notification popped into my inbox.

I made it in to Denver, and made it through Monday.  It was beautiful outside today here in Denver, but a cold front swept in at around 4 pm and chilled the air down to below freezing by the time we walked back to the hotel.

We joke sometimes and say the hotel is our ‘home away from home’ – but it really is not, now is it?  Nothing in there is yours. You check out and clear out completely.  Here’s a picture of my hotel room this morning just before I started scrambling to get everything packed up.  (It’s actually been a very long time since I have left anything behind).   My basic hotel room rule is not to put anything away in a dresser, a drawer or a nightstand. That way I can do a 360° scan and grab anything that catches my eye.   Watch out for those white items on the white bed linen, though! They can hide in plain sight.  But white is a plus for an iPhone charger and its cable and head phones, though.  It makes those stand out in the shadows of the hotel room.

I have a very early flight out to Denver – 5.20 am – so I have to ‘hit the sack’ here.  My bags are packed, my shoes are polished and my shirt is ironed. No time for any of that when I wake up! I see it’s heavy going in the north east with all the snow that has fallen over the weekend.  I’m sure there will be flight cancellations and delays in that part of the country.

I am at Denver airport.   Our work week at the site is done, and we are on the way home. (More work from the home office tomorrow). There was a lot of traffic clogging the freeway out here, but not because of weather.  Just too many cars!  The Denver travelers are grateful for the mild temperatures and absence of snow and ice this week.  We could walk outside to go to lunch, and not worry too much about travel delays and flight cancellations.

I got to ‘sleep in’ until 6.30 am today.  I had a teeth cleaning and check-up scheduled at the dentist for 7.30 am. It was raining and I thought I would take the car to the dentist, come back to the house and have the taxi (to the airport) pick me up there.  But at 7 am I discovered the car was dead as a dodo – man! I thought, how strange, since it started perfectly fine on Saturday. (Time for a new car? is always the question).

Anyway, I saw on my iPhone that the next no 10 bus with its stop close by my house was just 4 minutes away, so that became Plan B, and got me to downtown (the dentist) in good time. The taxi picked me up at the dentist at 8.30 am, took me home to pick up my luggage, and off to the airport we went.  The 11 am flight was delayed by 30 minutes, which was a good thing for me.  (Not so good for the people with tight connections in Denver).  Another taxi from Denver airport to downtown, and it was 4 pm by the time I rolled into the office.   What a day.

It was a low-key day at work for me here in the Denver office.  The Bronco fans were very disappointed with their team’s poor showing at the Superbowl (of course).

It was bearable outside as I stepped out of the taxi from Denver airport (bearable = 20 °F/ -6 °C). But maybe I’m only saying that because it’s going to get a lot colder over the next few days!

I am at Denver airport, and it looks like I will be able to get out of here just ahead of several inches of snow that may accumulate tonight and tomorrow morning.  Locations around the city of Denver expect 6 to 10 inches of snow by Friday afternoon – not a good outlook for continued operations at the airport, I would say.  The airport is some 25 miles west from the city.

‘Time to ride’ say the banners here in Denver : a reference to the Denver Broncos’ mascot, and their Superbowl match-up on Sunday Feb 2 against the Seattle Seahawks.

There was a little snow on the ground this morning; just enough to make it too cold and too difficult to walk to the office – especially with one’s roller bag luggage in tow. 14° F ( -10 °C) is definitely too frigid to be out and about! My name is not Robert Scott or Roald Amundsen!.  We managed to hail down a taxi to take us to the office, though.

It’s Martin Luther King Day, but only about 1/3 of employers recognize it as a holiday, so I traveled out to Denver.   My return air fare was a ridiculously cheap $137.  That’s about the same as the 20 min taxi fare to Seattle airport this morning plus the 40 min taxi fare to the office in Denver after landing. The airlines’ computer geeks supposedly maximize the profit on every seat, on every plane, on every route .. but it sure seems like they were not profiting from my fare!

As the statistics tell us : it’s much safer to fly for two hours than to drive for two hours, and Thursday night proved that point.   On the drive home from Seatac airport I was half-asleep in the back when my taxi driver stirred with a fright and grabbed his phone.   Maybe he forgot to phone someone really important, I thought.   But no : he was dialing 911. There was a driver in a white car facing south on northbound I-5 in the shoulder lane.  So luckily she had managed to get to the shoulder – but man! how on earth did she manage to use the north-bound off-ramp to drive south?  Was the fog partly to blame? It really wasn’t that thick.  Anyway, there was nothing on the news, and there is nothing on the WSDOT blog, so I trust that she got help and that the situation was remedied.

 

I am at Denver airport. It’s Thursday and so most of the travelers on the project – and me – are heading home tonight.  The office people here plan to wear something orange tomorrow to support the Denver Broncos in their bid against the New England Patriots for a place in the Superbowl final.   (And Seattle’s Seahawks play against the San Francisco 49ers this weekend.  In Seattle, the colors to wear are blue with a little lime green trim).

My colleague and I tried a new taxi service smart phone app; this one is called Metro Taxi.  It’s just a little easier to order a taxi than using the phone and yelling one’s name (and sometimes its spelling) into the phone for the dispatcher.  And here in Denver there seems to be a 5 minute or longer wait time for a dispatcher every time I call the cab company.

 

My early morning flight out to Denver today went without incident (because I was sleeping most of the way).  It was a different story trying to get to Denver downtown from the airport, though.   The one part was our mistake (my colleague’s and mine) : agreeing with a friendly guy to share a taxi to the city to save a few dollars.  He was dropped off first, and the detour added about 30 mins to our trip to the office.   The other part was not our fault, though.  The entire I-270 highway was closed in both directions from 3 am to 1 pm.   Turned out a fugitive was shot in the early hours of the morning by the local police (non-life threatening injuries), and the highway was closed in both directions for an investigation.   So what should have been a 30 min ride, took 1 hr and 40 mins stuck in traffic.  Oy vey.