Disaster Area

Regent Street

I was out last night wandering around London and ended up at Regent Street, one of the big shopping areas. As the Christmas shopping season over here starts around the end of August, the decorations have been up for ages. Here's what Regent Street looked like last night:

Downtown London

I'm in London for a conference, staying at the Hilton on Park Lane. Park Lane is, of course, one of the top two properties on the English Monopoly board. So hey, I'm staying on a hotel in Park Lane! Last time I did that I was fifteen and paying my dad 400 pounds for the privilege! The real hotel looks a little like this:

 

The view from the window is pretty nice - I'm on the 10th floor overlooking Hyde Park. Here's the rather dramatic view of the afternoon sky from the window as I was settling in.

 

And then later that night:

 

Best and Worst Airline Seats

If you travel very much at all, you will find seatguru.com to be a very useful site. It has seating layouts for just about every airplane actually in service at every major airline, and shows which are good, which are bad, and why. Here, for example, is a British Airways four class Boeing 777:

Good seats are green, bad seats are red, but more importantly, as you mouse over the layout on the website you see detailed descriptions of the good and bad points of particular seats. Use it before you select seats for your next flight...

Beach Fun

Reno to Seattle

A Few Odds and Ends

The last couple of days in England I took a few photographs, then on the flight home we flew over Greenland, where there were some spectacular vistas. The moon was out, too. It can be difficult to capture the wide open views on camera, but they're worth posting anyway. So, here are some photos from the last couple of days of the trip.

On the trip from the Northeast to Manchester I took the scenic route across the north Pennines. I didn't get much of a chance to take pictures other than stopping in the various parking spots along the way, though. Pretty cold and windswept, but refreshing. And not very crowded.

And a view of the road:

And then on to Greenland:

And...

One Leg Down

Today went really smoothly, well, apart from a couple of glitches. The first was when my friend Dave was driving into the airport. I said, "OK, I've got everything - wallet, cell phone..."

Dave says, "Do you have your passport?"

"D'oh!"

So it was fifteen minutes back to the house to get the passport, then fifteen more back to the airport. I blame it on the fact that I wasn't thinking International Travel because of the domestic first leg.

The second was the fact that I was flying on a 757-200. It takes a long time to load, especially when packed to the gills, and I ended up with a seat that reclined whether you wanted it to or not.

Other than that, my luggage showed up quickly in one piece, and it was easy finding my friend Eileen who was picking me up from the airport. What with the household wi-fi, I'm all set. Went out to dinner tonight with Wayne and Eileen and Steve and Mary Chris (only Eileen couldn't make it out to Seattle for the service) so it was a nice mini-reunion.

Tuesday night we have a sort of open house reunion with handbell ringers from back in eighties and any other old friends I can find in the next eighteen hours.

First Arrivals

Well, the first wave of out-of-towners arrived today. A late start from Heathrow, an even later landing, and a simultaneous arrival with an EVA Air flight that swamped customs and immigration meant that Ruth and Gary (Sue's brother and sister) were almost three hours late.

I got them to the friends they are staying with and bade them a long and hopefully restful night's sleep. While we were waiting I got a call from one of my brothers at 8 pm, or 4 am UK time. Apparently they needed my address to give to the airline, so tomorrow's flights are already well under way.

As for the rest of today, it was a mish-mash of tidying up and odd projects that have lain in wait for a while. Such as the roller blinds we got for the bedroom. The roman shades we have are pretty, but don't block much light, so we decided to add roller blinds behind them. Well, I finally got one installed. maybe the other two tomorrow. Oh, and I completely changed out the cat litter in all three trays (don't ask) and got all the washing done, including getting the shirts hung up before they creased.

Vacation Scorecard

Well, thanks to Hawaiian Airlines terrible on-time record, we managed to get home by 2 am today. This was after an hour plus delay for mechanical reasons (although we dodged the brunt of it, as they gave us Seattle bound passengers the plane the Portland bound travelers were supposed to get. The poor Portland passengers had to wait for the part to be flown in from Honolulu and God only knows when they got home.) Then of course, we had to wait an hour for bags.

So, the travel scorecard looks like:

Hawaiian Airlines: D
Service was OK, but the outbound flight was 5 hours late and
the return flight is outlined above.

National Car Rental: C
The Mustang convertible was OK, but all the ones they had were looking a bit ragged around the edges with 11,000+ miles on them. Ours also had a loose exhaust bracket or something that made a nasty buzzing at 1500 rpm.

Paragon Sailing Charters: A
Two great sailing trips and impeccable service. It didn't hurt that the two guys that ran the sunset cruise gave us all a chuckle as they looked a bit like Owen Wilson and a young Fabio.

Blue Hawaiian Helicopters: A
Despite the weather canceling our trip to the Haleakala crater, the alternative was still great, and hey, it's a helicopter ride.

Cheeseburger in Paradise: C-
Nice, fun idea that's turned just a little too crass and commercialized for its own good.

Hula Grill: A+
Just an awesome restaurant - the one in Ka'anapali, Maui is unbeatable for beach atmosphere and excellent food, but the one in Waikiki is pretty good too. Incredible service. The barefoot bar in the Maui restaurant is great for an informal lunch, while the more formal dining room features great service and incredible food. Unbeatable location.

Leilani's: A+
Another great beachfront restaurant at Ka'anapali. Owned by the same people as the Hula Grill, slightly different atmosphere - a little more formal.

Kimo's: A-
Yet another restaurant owned by the same people as Hula Grill, but this time in Lahaina. Food was great, ambiance and location is hard to beat, but the service was a bit lacking. It just shouldn't take 20 minutes to get the first drinks to the table. Thing is, looking at the sunset means you don't notice as much.

Maui Brewing Co: C+
This is no Kona Brewing Co, which is very sad for them (our vacations in Kona have featured many visits to the KBC, which is the perfect brewpub in paradise). This is an OK place for lunch, when the menu is less formal, but the whole ambiance screams of anything but brewpub. It's a weird place to have dinner, as the menu is way too upscale for brewpub, and the decor is just odd. It really needs to figure out what it wants to be when it grows up. I'd give it a B for lunch and a D for dinner.

Borders Books: A+
When you need more books on a vacation, Borders is just great.

So there you have it.

Last Vacation Post

had a fabulous last full day here today. We went on a helicopter trip with Blue Hawaiian Helicopters.

Sadly,. the weather today was pretty awful - massive clouds everywhere, so instead of flying up to the crater at Haleakala (which would have been cool) we headed west over to west Maui and on over to the island of Moloka'i. Moloka'i is still pretty undeveloped, and it's famous as the site of a leper colony that was ministered to by Father Damien back in the 19th century.  We looked at a few waterfalls and deep rift valleys before heading out to sea over a sheer 1,700 ft cliff. Flying over that drop was just incredible. This picture doesn't do the coast justice, because I only had my long zoom lens with me.

There will be video eventually, which I'll post up if it looks good.

Our last real vacation act (other than packing) was to have dinner one last time at the Hula Grill. The walk up to the restaurant is a bit like the entrance to the Disneyland Indiana Jones ride. I like to think of it as Indiana Jones and the Restaurant of Doom...

And then, because of the really awful weather today (well, it was only cloudy, really) we got the weakest sunset of all. But as we ate at the Hula Grill we did get a little bit of a show:

Until probably Monday at least, Aloha.