Category: Travel

As the first class flyers were boarding in Salt Lake City on Thursday night for our flight to Seattle, a guy was let on board with a Great Dane service dog.  I was in coach and we all thought ‘Well, this will be interesting : to see where the dog goes’. Turned out the guy had a whole set of three bulkhead seats in coach to himself, so that there was room for the dog to lie on the floor at his feet. This would NOT have worked with a full flight!    Then as we approached Seattle, the pilot warned that it was  foggy – and that he may have to do a touch-and-go landing if the fog was a lot thicker than they had anticipated.  We could even have ended up at Portland airport 120 miles south.   But all went well – even though the runway appeared suddenly out of nowhere – and so we landed and taxied to the gate.

The blue and red tails of the Delta jets are from Concourse C at Salt Lake City airport. One of them will get me out of Dodge*.  The project’s workshops are done for the week.  We did a tour through the plant where we are working today.   It was bitterly cold as we walked outside, so our little group of 5 was all too thankful to duck inside each of the buildings that was part of the tour so that our noses and ears could defrost.  One building has a furnace in. ‘Do we have to leave?’ we said when it was time to go.  If you’re not in an office, that is where you should work in winter time!

*’Getting out of Dodge’ is an idiomatic reference to a phrase used in the TV series ‘Gunsmoke’. The villains were told to get out of Dodge City, Kansas. (Yes, there is still a Dodge City in Kansas, named for Fort Dodge nearby).

The last rays of the sun just caught the snow on the mountaintops in the Wasatch range as we drove back from work today.

I braved the bone-chilling cold late this afternoon to go out and take a few pictures – but man!  I had to give it up after 30 mins.  My thick stretch jeans was no match for the cold that seemed to come right through it.  I did not wear my gloves, thinking it would interfere with my picture taking – big mistake.  And I was very worried about condensate in my camera as well — I’m not supposed to use it in these low temperatures without a cover.

This Sunday night finds me at Seatac airport for another trip to Salt Lake City.  Only one more to go after this one – a good thing because I am not used to ‘solidly frozen’ temperatures.  Seattle weather usually manages to stay more or less above 32° F (0 °C) for most of the winter (the average nightly low for Dec-Jan is 36°F).  At least I remembered to pack my Cossack-style woolen hat that covers my ears and straps down under my chin, my gloves, and an extra scarf.

I made it to the airport, driving very carefully.  The hardest part was getting the 3 inches of fluffy snow off my Nissan Altima rental car.  The snow is not so fluffy right there on the windshield and windows : you have to scrape the ice crystals off.  (The combination brush-scraper Hertz provides does a great job).   And I remembered from my winters in St Louis to brush off snow powder from the car seat and from my clothes immediately.  The stuff melts and becomes icy wet water (of course).

It’s Wednesday and three of us stopped at Ruan Thai for dinner.  The air outside is chilly, stagnant and bone dry, but that is set to change Thu and Fri with winds and lots of snow in the forecast.  The mountains are expected to get more than a foot, which I am sure the skiers are eagerly anticipating.  I just hope I will be able to drive to the airport on Friday.

I finally got over a bad cold I had and was well enough to fly out to Utah for my project on Monday night.  Speaking of cold, the Salt Lake City area is off to a chilly start for 2013.  Even the Salt Lake Tribune newspaper says so.  Temperatures here have yet to rise above freezing (32°F) since the start of the year.  It does look like it will happen on Wednesday – but only to dip down to an estimated 13°F (-11°C) on Thursday night.

I made it !  It was 9 hours from Munich to Newark Liberty International Airport (in the New York area), 2 hours of stressful connection at Newark, and then another 6 hours to Seattle.

At Newark (this is standard for USA international arrivals) you have to go through passport control, get your bags, clear customs, re-check your bags, and then go and stand in a very long line to go through TSA security again for your connecting flight. So the lesson is : try to fly directly home from overseas.  If that is not possible, pack your patience and make sure you have two hours to connect, since one hour will not do it.

I am at Munich airport, and I am ready to go home.  I did not get much sleep last night with all the firework-hubbub and noises outside.  There is no prohibition on buying and shooting off fireworks in Munich, and boy, do the citizens go at it !  I also had to allow extra time for the train to the airport.  The train would not be late, of course.  But I could have read the on-line timetable wrong, or the New Years Day schedule could have been different from the usual Tuesday one.   But not to worry, at Ostbahnhof station the signs confirmed that the S8 Flughafen train scheduled for 6.24 am, as I expected..

This is the exit gate at Oliver Tambo International airport in Johannesburg’s parking garage.  I am sure my American readers will appreciate the spiked barrier and the ‘wait for the green robot’ instruction.  (Don’t expect a green robot cross in front of the car.   ‘Wait for the green robot’ is South African for ‘Wait for the green traffic light’. And I love those mean spikes that will puncture your car’s tires if you do not comply .. as if the boom is not enough!).

The heat gave way to a cool rainy day in the Western Cape.  I am at Cape Town international airport -heading north to Johannesburg on South African Airways* to visit a friend for a day or two.

*The national carrier is in financial trouble, but the South African government announced in October that it would provide US$ 600 million of financing over the next two years.

Sunday was another beautiful blue-sky day here in the Western Cape.  My brothers and I went to lunch with our cousin at the wine estate of Vergelegen (Dutch for ‘far away’).  A little bit of history : in 1700, Dutchman and Cape colony Governor Willem Adriaan van der Stel was granted the property of Vergelegen.  He set out to build a main house and others in a style under the Renaissance influence of wealthy estates and palaces in Europe at the time.  However, his lavish spending on the property and other actions trying to establish a monopoly in the trade of wine and meat for himself caused a revolt under the free ‘burghers’ (independent farmers), and led to his recall and return to the Netherlands in 1707.  The estate was sold several times after that, most recently to the mining company Anglo-American in 1987.  At that time wine was no longer produced, but within ten years the estate was recognized as producing some of South Africa’s finest wines.

I was my turn today to pick up my brother and his family from California at Cape Town airport.   They arrived on Air France via Paris, on the Boeing 777 shown below.  Check out the international arrivals board – 1. showing only about a dozen scheduled arrivals for the day (so Cape Town is a small airport by international standards) and 2. arrivals from some interesting places such as Antarctica and Maun.   The flight from in from Antarctica is probably on an Ilyushin Il-76, a Russian-made transport plane. There was one on the tarmac when I came in on Wednesday.  And Maun is a small town of modern buildings and mud huts in the north of Botswana on the Okavango Delta.

Our Lufthansa Airbus A380 from Frankfurt to Johannesburg was also namedthe ‘Johannesburg’.  It’s a big bird, and on take-off it feels too slow and sluggish to lift off from the runway, but then it actually does.  I sat upstairs on the wing.   That was a 10 hr flight, and then a ‘hop’ of 2 hours from Johannesburg to Cape Town on South African airways got me to my final destination.   Cape Town was at a sweltering 36°C (97°F) today, but the day temperatures are projected to go down somewhat for the rest of the week.