Category: Travel

All indications to the contrary, I’m still alive. It has been a lovely, if thundery, few days here in the mountains to the north and west of Asheville. Food has been commensurate with past experiences—steak at my uncle’s on Tuesday night, big southern breakfast Wednesday (eggs, sausage, sawmill gravy, biscuits, grits, tomatoes, cantaloupe, fig preserves, and black black coffee), a repeat of the fish tacos experiment last night. Tonight we’re going to make our way to the Jarrett House—if there is a connection to our family other than the name, it’s a distant one—for some fried chicken and trout.

Then, if we survive the meals, we’ll go to a rare movie on Friday, then get back on the road Saturday to go back to New Jersey, where we can collect the dogs and head for home.

Anyone wondering where I am is forewarned: it’s going to be a nice quiet vacation for me for about a week. Leaving out the car trips, which render it a nice, nerve-wracking headache of a vacation.

Today, for instance, we’re at Lisa’s parents in coastal New Jersey, after a six hour trip holding Joy (our Bichon dog who hates to travel, even when tranquilized). Our reward for the trip: a beach excursion cut short by 54° water. (It was 70° F three days ago before the storm.)

That’s OK. I made some killer fish tacos (fried tilapia and sour cream/lime/chipotle sauce) that more than made up for it, as far as I’m concerned.

Remind me never to fly again out of Logan on the Friday after school lets out.

I was at Logan at 5:15 this morning. The garage was open and uncrowded and I expected a sail through security. I practically walked into a wall of people, though, when I got into the terminal—security lines snaking through the ticket area; ticket lines snarled. And (my heart sank) not a business suit in sight.

No, I was trapped with a bunch of Leisure Travelers. People who decided that getting to the airport three hours early for their flight was too late—and they were right, because they and their fellow Leisure Travelers had no idea how to negotiate security quickly, no idea how to check in the night before at home, no idea how to use the check-in kiosks. No idea that the security line was actually two lines. No idea that knives are not allowable carry-on baggage. No idea that we have been fighting a War On Moisture&tm; for almost a year now.

Not that anyone was making it easier for them. Ahead of me in line, I watched as every passenger on a 22-person flight was selected for “special screening.”

I think this is the ugly secret of business travelers: we hate leisure travelers passionately. Oh, we are tolerant and indulgent—until you slow up the line, bring a bottle of water in your bag, set off the metal detector with your pocket-knife, cause my business flight to get overbooked.

But the worst, the very worst thing about this morning: they have moved the Starbucks out of the United side of Terminal C. And put a Dunkin Donuts in its place. Now, I’m as Bostonian as the next transplant from Virginia, but if I wanted to drink dishwater flavored with corn syrup and soy powder, I’d order that. Instead, when I order coffee, I want it black and strong. I guess I’ll have to wait until I land in Chicago.

It’s strange being in someone else’s college town. You get all the facets of college life—cheap, unhealthy food; cheaper beer; the unhurried pace of college life. We checked into our hotel in a local college town today and asked about food. The clerk behind the desk said, “If you just want a quick bite, the place across the street has a gyro special today—gyro, fries, and large drink for $3.99.”

As my colleague said later, “He was definitely a college student. Now that I’m out of college—I’m on an expense account—I don’t care so much about cheap any more. I’m more interested in good.”

Touché. Still, there’s something to be said for the bargain, the “cheap and good” option. That’s where I always felt college students were really good at establishing a market.

Unfortunately, in places like Charlottesville, the positive effects of the students are counterbalanced by parents and alums, who inexplicably kept places like The Virginian alive long past its freshness date. I should note I haven’t eaten there since 1995 or so, but then it felt like it should not have existed because no students were ever there and the food wasn’t really good enough to draw the townie crowd.

It is Friday evening on Memorial Day Weekend. I have the honor of flying to Richmond tonight so that I can attend my sister’s graduation tomorrow as ambassador from the Boston Jarretts. I am excited and happy for her, but at the same time I’m puzzled. Why? Because I’m sitting in an empty airport, that’s why.

The road was virtually empty as Lisa drove me into Logan tonight; the airport is almost empty. Granted, I have a flight that leaves at 8:45 PM on Friday night, which might as well be midnight by airline standards, but still. Might the best time to travel on Memorial Day weekend be … Friday night?

Interesting article in the New York Times today about how airlines handle communications with customers when something goes wrong. Perhaps because JetBlue is too busy figuring out what the hell happened over the last six weeks to talk to the press, the paper talks to the “chief apology officer” of Southwest Airlines. And the article shows why Southwest, which has been the low-cost airline of choice for over 35 years, is still a customer favorite.

If, as Doc Searls writes, companies have souls, then Southwest’s soul is funny, irreverent, but deeply concerned that you get there on time and enjoy yourself while doing so—in other words, the perfect cruise director. And really, that’s not such a bad way to think about the job of the overworked, underpaid flight attendants and gate staff who have to deal with arrogant type A business travelers like myself and clueless vacation travelers like the folks who are generally in the security line before me. The surprise is not that Southwest is so good at what it does, it’s that the other airlines haven’t figured out how important it is.

That’s why a nightmare like Southwest’s experience in Las Vegas last month (while I was there, the rumors were coming back to the Venetian about two hour waits to get into the terminal and eight hour waits at the ticket counters) is only a blip for the airline, while the completely understandable weather delays that hit JetBlue have totally paralyzed it. JetBlue doesn’t have a soul yet. Its early spirit—a smart, modern, can-do pioneer—lasted only as long as its long-term future strategy on jet fuel prices did. I still remember having conversations with a quiet, rueful attendant the week that they took their first bad quarter. They haven’t regained that spirit yet. Perhaps by taking a lesson from Southwest, they might start to regain some of that spirit.

I awake in the Windy City this morning, having arrived here late last night and checked into the Palmer House Hilton. It’s funny how a place like Vegas changes your perspective. Normally, I like the historical flavor of a place like the Palmer House, which is 135 years old and heavy on the scenery, particularly in the lobby. But after a few days at the Venetian, all I could think of when I stepped into my room was, This is tiny. In my defense, I think I was influenced primarily by my long ride in the middle seat and secondarily by the extensive plywood hiding the restoration work in the aforementioned lobby, which kind of cooled the impact.

So: down to breakfast, and then home. And then tomorrow: jury duty. Yay.

Leaving Las Vegas today (and yes, that would probably have made a better blog post title). Just wrapped up two days at the Pink Elephant conference at the Venetian. It was an interesting time—a lighter crowd than in past years for this conference, and coming in on Sunday night while the crowd for the NBA All Star game was still in town was a little… chaotic.

Getting out of town has been a little worrisome, too. The rumor coming back to the Venetian was that Southwest had overbooked their outgoing flights by about 40%, resulting in 9-hour-long lines at the ticket counters and a general swamping of the airport on Monday. It was pretty straightforward today, though.

Alas, I’m not going straight home; one more business meeting in Chicago calls. But after that I am back to Boston. Thank goodness.

Oh, and the big disappointment of the conference? No Beatles karaoke.

This morning my coworker and I chipped a half-inch of ice off the rental car and trundled over to our prospective customer’s offices. By mid-afternoon most of the roads were clear, the ice and snow had stopped, the sun was shining, and flights were proceeding out of Columbus.

Except, of course, those flights in the direction of Boston.

Yes, my flight was canceled. Though the weather is OK in Columbus, it’s crappy in Boston so those flights were delayed and canceled. At least I got an early morning flight back, so I can get the driveway shoveled out before business gets started.

I did get lucky in one respect. One of our customers suggested that Easton Town Center was a pretty good place near the airport to stay if I needed to get a hotel room. That tip put me in walking distance of a half dozen places to eat and a bookstore—much better than the airport food options. I even found Leffe Blonde on tap (though admittedly that’s easier than it once was—kudos to their distribution people).

I’m back in sunny Columbus, Ohio for a few days—just in time for a nice winter storm. It snowed all night, fortunately only about a foot accumulation, but it turned into ice about noon today.

This trip has been a lot of work, but so far the actual travel experience has been easier. I got to the hotel about 11 pm, got a good night’s sleep, will get to nap for a bit before dinner… all sorts of good stuff.

My only weather related worry, in fact, is that I have my very nicest wingtips and no other shoes. It’s a good thing Ohio doesn’t salt roads the way Massachusetts does, or the leather would already be totally destroyed.

What can be said about Cleveland, Tennessee? Perhaps its ambassador, the Diplomat Motel, a sagging fleabag of odd smells and rusty plumbing, sitting as it does at the fringe of a used car lot, tells part of the story. But then, any $35 hotel room is probably an unfair representation of the city in which it sits. How about this: less than a mile up the road from the Diplomat is a shopping center with a brand new Starbucks, with wifi and high school kids who joke that slinging coffee for the rest of their lives would be a desirable career—a joke because they know they can and will do much more.

Actually, the above probably says as much about Starbucks as anything else.

There is something melancholic about waiting around the ass end of Logan—the AirTran gate known as 1C—for the last flight to Atlanta. There is something even more melancholic in knowing that when I land, I’ll have to make my way across the airport to the rental cars and drive another two hours into the heart of Tennessee. Ah well. It beats waiting for a flight to Chattanooga.

So it was, as we arced out of the airport at LA after crawling painfully to it through the traffic along the 405, as we settled into the airplane seats for the unjustly long coast-to-coast flight, which leaves one gazing desperately at the Skymiles catalog as a sort of antidote to fatal ennui rather than the suck of despair it really is (“the Victorian Glowing Painting! The turbo yuppie nose hair trimmer! The officially licensed Porsche self-motorized wheelchair!”), that I decided that travel has, after all, compensatory value.

Sure, there are downsides to spending one to three nights a week on the road, particularly when one’s wife is unwell and the dogs need to be put under general anesthesia for a dental procedure. (Which, by the way, is something that far too few human dentists seem willing to do.) But the opportunity to catch up on weeks of neglected email, to rearrange one’s Documents folder, to sit next to one’s vice president and look productive… priceless.

As I think back, though, the route between LA and the east coast has been a good one for me. Back in 1995, the LAX-Dulles route was the first I flew regularly, traveling between a DOD site and my former employer’s offices in the DC suburbs. It was this route on which I had my first really bad travel experience (chronicled elsewhere on this site), in which a brief delay extended to four hours’ delay on the ground at Dulles and a four hour free stay in an airport hotel in LA before proceeding to the poetically named Inyokern Airport (international call letters: IYK, “Icky” phonetically). Yes, gentle reader, back then airlines put you up gratis if their colossal blunders and failures to abide by generally accepted maintenance practices left you stranded; compare to my experiences trying to get from Boston to Salt Lake in September, which left me stranded in Chicago for 18 hours completely on my own nickel. But the route had its charms. Back then food on the flight, while dubious, was free, and while beer and wine were $3 (somehow, priced at a value point less than hard alcohol, as though the point was to make one visit the restroom to void the extra water included in the $1 discounted bargain) it was nice to sit with a 187ml bottle of something vaguely Californian and read.

Some of those cross-country flights were notable cultural experiences for me. I still remember settling back with a hardback 1940s edition of For Whom the Bell Tolls (purchased in some Georgetown used bookstore, now long vanished) and a small bottle of cabernet, and finding wedged into the pages a photo of a Korean woman, perhaps a serviceman’s sweetheart. I still have the book, and the photo, and will have to scan the latter and post it. Perhaps someone can reclaim that piece of a family history. I just know that it gave me a shudder of synchronicity as reminders of one war nestled among the fictional recollections of another.

Or on another occasion, one of several red-eyes, armed with a newly affordable portable CD player and falling asleep to a newly purchased copy of the Hilliard Ensemble’s Codex Specialnik, as pure a celebration of Renaissance polyphony in all its anonymous glory that the great men’s ensemble has ever produced.

And tonight, on one of the few LA-to-east-coast direct flights that I’ve taken since those days, I sit with a laptop and a “RightBites” box dinner, which costs $5 and combines various organic processed foods (pita chips, hummus, Late July brand “rich crackers,” canned tuna, raisins, Toblerone bar) into what still feels like a school lunch. But I have a 187ml bottle of cabernet, now also $5 (the same price as the Devil’s liquor), and a laptop with a podcast from KEXP on it, and noise cancelling headphones, which alone are worth much of the inconvenience that has occurred in the intervening 11 years.

And what if the turbulence makes it difficult to read the high-resolution LCD screen of the laptop? And what if I will arrive home after midnight and have to attend to another sales prospect, another customer issue, another product decision, bright and early tomorrow morning? I have wine and music. Who can say I am not the happy genius of my household?

If anyone is going to be at the HDI ITIM show at the Venetian this week, I’ll be at the iET Solutions booth. Hope to see some of you there.

Also hope that there isn’t a repeat of what happened the last time I was in Vegas for a conference. Please.

I’m back home. Amazingly enough, there were no further travel incidents—unless you count the flight out of Calgary taking off 90 minutes late for no apparent reason, causing me to take a later connection out of Chicago.

While we were in Calgary, I had two sushi experiences. One was a meal at Zen 8, just down the block from Belgo in Penny Lane, where we asked for omikase and got a really nice assortment of stuff—nothing spectacularly weird from the fish perspective but good quality and very reasonable.

The other was a place we saw on Highway 1 on the way in. I looked to my right at a stoplight and noted a sushi restaurant—right next to an aquarium store. “At least it’s fresh,” my co-worker noted. I got a picture of this place and will try to post it tomorrow.

Update (13 Oct 2006): Finally got around to posting the picture on Flickr (and above).