Recently in Travellin' Man Category

And in other news, perhaps a road trip to Montreal is in order.

The meltdown at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 continues. The BBC is reporting that British Airways is admitting that they have fifteen thousand stranded bags at Heathrow and that a internal source admits that the number could go as high as twenty thousand.

How badly bungled has this opening been? Well, it turns out that BA’s own employees couldn’t even find the right parking garage when they reported to work on day one.

Amusingly, BA’s own website claims that “It shouldn’t take long to get from Check-in to Departures.” They apparently left out the bit where passengers sit for hours and hours in Departures waiting for flights that never take off….

You might want to hold off on those cheap flights to Europe if you were planning on being routed through Heathrow.

Admittedly, going through Heathrow has never been a walk in the park, at least based on my experience of last year, but this sounds like it’s going to a whole different level….

Coming soon, at least according to this Times article about the ‘open skies’ agreement with the EU that comes into effect at the end of the month. Apparently RyanAir is proposing base prices as low as 10 euros, but only from secondary airports to secondary airports. Hmm… I wonder if New Haven is in their plans.

I think that in practice, there will be an immediate and sudden drop in prices as airlines scramble to establish mindshare, but that prices will subsequently start to creep back up as things shake out.

Now, if there were only open skies agreements with Asia….

Related: Time on the homeless problem at Heathrow. As far as I can tell, this isn’t as big a problem at the airports that I tend to frequent, though having said that, it’s quite possible that the homless people at JFK do a pretty good job of disguising themselves (or they hang out at different terminals).

On a meta note, it should be interesting to see what this post does to the Google ads I get….

As some of you know, I'm going to be on the road again next week. And, as has become traditional, when I'm on the road, I send you, gentle reader, a post card.

And what, I hear you ask, must I do to receive such a thing? Well, all you have to do is tell me where you want me to send it (also known as your address).

Killer jetlag, trying to pack, buying a car, etc. But I made a short film about what BKK (aka Bangkok Suvarnabhumi International Airport) is like at 4 in the morning (flash, video, audio):

I’d also like to thank my intrepid guestbloggers for keeping pf.org humming while I was away…

UPDATE: For those who prefer their video as downloadable QuickTime goodness (and, admittedly, with somewhat better quality than Flash video, though given that the source material for this was in glorious 320x240, the quality gain isn’t that much), here’s the film as an 80MB QT movie: BKK.mov

Point:

• Koh Tao is waaaaaay more developed than it used to be. Goddamn tourists.
• When arranging travel, please remember for future reference that a flight that lands at 2 a.m. to connect to a flight that leaves at 6 a.m. is sub-optimal planning.
• Particularly when the first flight is delayed by an hour.
• Because that means you’ll end up sleeping for about 20 hours out of your first 24 in your intended destination.
• Having said that, the new airport in Bangkok is pretty interesting.
• Lobster Red is not a flattering shade for my complexion.
• Am off to go diving with sharks this afternoon. Professional courtesy and all.
• Diving is like riding a bike. You never forget the basic skills.
• That Harry Potter book? Pretty good conclusion to the series, though given how unrelentingly dark it is, I’m not really sure that it qualifies as children’s book.

That is all for now. Back in a while.

Point: I’m done with the bar exam. Hopefully I passed—we’ll see when the scores come out in November.

Point: I’m about to head off to the exotic far east for two weeks of R&R. I’ve left you in the hands of some capable guest-bloggers to handle the traffic while I’m on a beach in the Gulf of Thailand.

Point: If you too are going to be in the far east, drop me a line and maybe we can figure out how to get our paths to cross.

Point: My flight leaves in four hours and I still have clothes in the washing machine.

Going to Cali for my brother’s graduation in a lightening trip. Nearly 20% of the time away will be spent in airplanes, airports, or other modes of transcontinental transportation.

Be back on Monday, somewhat groggy from the red-eye.

As it turned out, while I did spend a ridiculous amount of time on airplanes and other forms of transportation on my recent jaunt (approximately 39 hours airborne, plus about 12 hours on trains), I got surprisingly little reading done whilst travelling—about 1/3 of the way into Moby Dick was about the extent of it.

Why? Well, I had failed to take in to account the fact that due to the circumstances of the trip (particularly on the back end), I managed to spend the vast majority of such time in transit sound asleep. Not the slumber that you see people enjoying in commercials for airlines, but rather the involuntary unconsciousness that just hits you like the proverbial ton of bricks; when fatigue simply overpowers volition.

Anyway, I was going back through some of the pictures from Vienna and it occurred to me that these long exposure shots from inside St. Stephen’s are really quite good. I might even print a few up.