While I do not do a huge amount of traveling, I do enough of it to have developed some useful tips. Here they are for your consideration:
- Book a direct flight. Yes, direct flights tend to cost more and no, they are not always available. However, if a direct flight is available, it is usually worth paying extra for it because you are much more likely to arrive at your destination on time. Flight delays also affect direct flights, but they are just as likely to affect your connecting flight too. If they do not affect your connecting flight but do affect your departure flight, it may mean that you will be placed on a later connecting flight, so you are likely to have two (or more!) flight delays instead of one. In short, the probability of travel delays increase with every connection. The impact of a travel delay is also inversely proportional to the length of time between connecting flights. In most cases, unless you simply cannot afford it, the cost of potential delays justifies the extra cost for a direct flight.
- Don’t book a late afternoon or evening flight. This advice applies primarily to the spring and summer, when thunderstorms and other major weather events are more likely. Weather causes most flight delays. In case you haven’t noticed, thunderstorms are much more likely to occur in the late afternoon or early evening after the atmosphere has been cooking for a while. So if you have a choice, leave earlier. As a bonus, airports will likely be less congested compared to later in the day.
- How to pick the best window seats. If you enjoy looking out your window, your view is going to be improved if the wing is not obscuring your scenery. Otherwise, you might as well book an aisle seat. So pick a window seat either in front of the wings or way in the back of the plane. When booking a flight, most airlines will show you a picture of seats in relation to the aircraft’s wings. Unless you like the sun coming through your window, pick a seat where you are less likely to have to deal with sunlight. In the northern hemisphere, when traveling west, sit on the right side. When traveling east, sit on the left side. Similar rules apply when traveling north or south, although you also have to factor in the time of day you will be traveling.
- How to pick the best aisle seats. If it is important for you to get up and move around during the flight, or you just need quick access to the lavatory, your best bet is probably aisle seats near the rear of the plane. The flight attendants will start services near the front of the coach section and work their way to the back. This gives you the opportunity to walk the aisle early in the flight as well.
- Frequent flier programs are less than they seem. It takes quite a bit of traveling to get any value from a frequent flier program. Most programs require 25,000 miles in order to qualify for a “free” flight. However, your ideal “free” flight is probably not available. Airlines deliberately limit the number of these seats on flights, making them hard to get. They also tend to block useful dates, like holidays, or convenient travel times. Moreover, your miles usually come with expiration dates, which mean that if you travel only a few times per year then you are unlikely to ever take advantage of the program. What you probably will get instead is endless marketing and credit card offers. When you want to use your miles, airlines will push you to use your miles to buy “discounts” for various flights. You may be able to get a better deal by looking for a discount flight with the same or another carrier. The most likely use of your miles will be to occasionally upgrade to business class, which is quite nice, but takes many miles to earn even this privilege. In short, for many people mileage programs feel like a scam.
- Use Hotwire for hotel bookings. If you feel confident that your travel dates and destinations won’t change, buy your hotel room in advance with Hotwire. Their savings on flights and rental cars are so-so, but not so with hotels. Since you don’t know precisely what hotel you will get until you pay, the first couple of times that you use Hotwire it has a dangerous feeling to it. However, before booking in Hotwire you can click on an area map to see whether the hotel with is close enough. In many cases, you can infer the actual hotel that you will get because there may be only a couple of hotels in the map area. Use Google Maps or Google Earth to see what hotels are available in the area shown on Hotwire’s area map. If you don’t like the hotels you see, then maybe you want to pay for precisely the hotel you want. What you do know up front is how much you will be paying, including applicable taxes, and the rates may astound you. So far, my experiences have all been positive. Nor have I ever gotten an undesirable room because I prepaid. Typically when I use Hotwire, I pay 25% to 40% less than an AAA rate at the same hotel. Particularly for extended touring types of vacations, you can save serious money using Hotwire, typically $500 or more. If you love dickering, you might get a lower rate on Priceline by negotiating your own price, but I haven’t found the time involved worth the hassle. Most of our hotels for our upcoming vacation are already booked using Hotwire.
- “Free” baggage on regional jets? On many smaller regional jets or propeller driven planes, a carryon bag simply will not fit in an overhead bin. (They won’t fit in many wide-body jets either.) Since they don’t fit, the gate crew will check them at the gate for you at no charge. In my experience, they tend to gate check anything you can bring through security for free. Considering that most carriers are charging $25 a bag, this could be a big savings.
- Take whatever you need for bed in your carryon. You are probably not planning to spend a night at some airport hotel, but I have inadvertently spent my share of them. If you do, you probably won’t be connected with your luggage overnight. Airlines also routinely lose luggage. This means you should consider carrying overnight essentials, like a travel-sized emergency kit of toothpaste and other things needed at bedtime (in three ounce containers or less), a hairbrush, medicines and a clean change of underwear in your carryon. At a minimum, always bring prescription medications in your carryon bag.
- Join AAA. Few things in life are a genuine bargain. AAA is one of them. Their towing service, available anywhere in the country as well as some foreign countries, is alone worth the cost of joining. However, comprehensive AAA tour books and maps also help you plan a quality vacation and come at no extra charge. You should probably avoid many other AAA products, like their insurance plans and credit cards. These products are likely not the best deals on the market, nor are the companies that underwrite them necessarily the best either. Like AARP, AAA uses these products as profit centers.
- Make, retain and reuse a travel-packing list. It is so easy to forget to pack items. Sometimes what you forget to pack can be a real time consuming hassle to deal with on the road. Write it once and refer to it when packing for every trip. You might also want to install an Android or iPhone travel-packing app on your smartphone. Of course, there is a web site that can help you as well.
- Consider a netbook. When you travel, you typically need more than a Smartphone but don’t want the hassle of a full sized laptop computer. The sweet spot is a netbook. The better netbooks will also play DVDs. Most are reasonably rugged and lightweight, making them easy to put in a carryon bag. While typing may be a bit challenging, you won’t be using them a lot. You can get a good netbook for a couple hundred dollars.
- Use the cloud. The internet is pervasive these days, at least if you are traveling in the first world. Assume that free or easily obtainable internet service will be locally available. Store all your email and important information in the cloud so it is accessible anywhere you need it. Google probably offers the best, freest and most reliable cloud-computing infrastructure. Import and move your email into a Gmail account and use it as your primary email. (Hint: if you use an email client like Outlook Express, set it up for IMAP use, so your email always stays in the cloud.) Since there is so much space, keep all your email in Gmail. Use Google Calendar as your calendar and Google Docs to store common structured and unstructured data. If you do it right, when you are on the road you have all your important information.
- Take your passwords with you. Store your passwords in a password manager like Keepass and bring it with you on a USB thumb drive. Keepass is simple and straightforward and can be run right off your thumb drive. You never can tell but you may have to transfer some funds in a far away city and need your passwords.
July 9th, 2010 at 06:18pm
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Mark |
Travel |
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Tags: Travel tips
Someone must have mistaken me for someone important. I am thirty floors up, living in this enormous hotel suite (which I calculate must at least be a thousand square feet) looking down on the breadth of San Antonio, Texas. To be specific, I am in the Marriott Rivercenter hotel. Perhaps my Marriott Silver Elite status entitled me to this free upgrade. In any event, I feel more than a bit flabbergasted. I have spent my share of time in four star hotels and in suite hotels. I have never had called such an upscale hotel room as before. You could fit four standard Courtyard Inn hotel rooms (another Marriott brand) into this hotel suite.
All this space was purchased at a government rate, which is not much over a hundred dollars a night. I have to assume I won the Marriott lottery or something, or someone on our convention planning committee highlighted my name and told the hotel to make sure I got a really nice room. While probably higher graded than most of the attendees, there are plenty attending this convention that make more money that I do. This makes me curious: what are their rooms are like?
How do you make a luxury room more luxurious than the competition’s? To some extent you go to silly extremes. For example, my clock radio has dual stereo speakers and also comes complete with a MP3 docking port. The floor lamp has a foot control that you use to vary the light level. You make sure the toilet has two push buttons instead of a handle, a number one (which delivers a half flush) and a number two (which delivers a full flush). Presumably you use the number one for going Number 1, and the number two for going Number 2. I haven’t looked at my local Lowes to see if this model of toilet is available there. I am guessing not. In any event, press either button and you get a huge, instant whoosh that quickly carries away any excrement.
The room also comes complete with a high definition 42-inch television. Plain wooden furniture won’t do. The dresser has to have a marble top on it, and the drawers have to be on metal rails. The coffee and end tables appear to be brushed metal. The sofas and chairs have pillows for lumbar support. The bed, oddly, is much lower than my regular bed but like all four star hotels these days it comes with six enormously stuffed pillows, far more than any couple could possibly use on this king sized bed.
Alas, I am here alone. However, had I known I would have gotten a room this nice, I would have insisted that my wife accompany me. She could spend her days ambling up and down San Antonio’s lovely River Walk, which you can get to from a shopping mall on one side of the hotel. Moreover, with this magnificent view it seems kind of a waste for me to be here all alone. This is the sort of room where you should definitely include some romantic cardiovascular exercise, preferably with the curtains wide open and the lights off. I am betting the rear entry position while gazing out the window would never feel more ecstatic than here thirty floors up and with the city of San Antonio splayed like a postcard out my window.
In any event, this room has pretty much anything I could want except a whirlpool bath and a comely woman between the sheets. No matter, there is a large pool and Jacuzzi on the fourth floor, and I intend to try it out later tonight and perhaps some comely females in tight bathing suits will be there. I need the exercise from the pool, although I did at least amble a mile or so this evening along River Walk. On the River Walk, the birds fearlessly grub for food among the tightly packed ambling humans. Motorized tourist boats chug down the small river (at best no more than three dozen feet across), and visitors can choose from literally hundreds of restaurants, many with live musicians and servers anxious to make eye contact so they can invite you to dine.
I haven’t found it yet, but somewhere near the River Walk is The Alamo, where occupying Texan soldiers were slaughtered by a much larger Mexican army some hundred and seventy plus years ago. As with most things, the Battle at The Alamo has been made to sound far nobler than it was. Vastly overwhelmed by the Mexican army, they could have easily been routed in a day, but Santa Anna wanted to play with the defenders, much like a cat will play with a mouse before killing it. While the battle does not deserve its overblown hype, it, plus the nearby River Walk helps bring in a lot of tourists, which makes the merchants, restaurant owners and hoteliers in San Antonio very happy.
San Antonio in May is quite warm and humid but still lovely. The River Walk is a strangely beautiful experience, but is somewhat marred by its many restaurants and shops that are clustered so close to its banks. It is full of paths and bridges, artificial waterfalls and limestone masonry. The city exists largely above it, which explains why I could not see it from my hotel room. This latitude has never agreed with me: it is too hot and humid overall, but at least along the River Walk you can forget the inch and a half long cockroaches and other scaly things you occasionally see here. Instead you can revel in the experience, which is sort of like the flume ride at Disney World without the flume, just the last bit before they haul you out of the boat on their artificial river. The San Antonio River is real enough, just smaller than I envisioned, with much of its water now able to be diverted along underground tunnels carved through the limestone. This is needed in the event of flooding, which happens periodically. I learned today that San Antonio still holds the world’s record for the largest volume of rainfall delivered in less than twenty four hours.
Three more days of meetings in conference room await, with one day already behind me. Today I just listened and took notes. Tomorrow I speak for twenty minutes or so to sixty people or so signed up for our workshop. Down on the conference level the internet is free, but up here on the 30th floor, Marriott wants you to spend $12.95 a day for the privilege. It is too pricey for me to indulge, so instead I will take a quick ride down to the third floor to post this.
I expect during my week here to be charmed by San Antonio as well as eat a lot of great Mexican food, something I don’t do back home as my wife dislikes Mexican food. I expect to feel a little hot under the collar when I venture outdoors, which suggests I should first put on a T-shirt. This hotel, like most here in Texas, is a big believer in excessive air conditioning. Likely I will glad to be heading back to Northern Virginia on Friday.
May 24th, 2010 at 09:04pm
Posted by
Mark |
Travel |
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Tags: Hoteliers, Marriott Hotels, River Walk, San Antonio, Texas, The Alamo
For as long as I can remember, maps have fascinated me. This may have come from not having a very adventurous childhood. Our vacations, when they happened at all, rarely occurred more than a few hundred miles from home. I never took a commercial airline flight until I was an adult. However, we did have an oversized National Geographic atlas of the world. It was a good way to visit faraway places in my imagination.
I was fortunate enough for a while to work for what was then the Defense Mapping Agency. While I had no training in cartography, I did earn a modest living tracking the printing of various topographic maps and nautical charts used by the military. It was neat to watch the process, from the careful correction of negatives (generally one for each map color) to seeing the map roll off the presses. I left that job more than twenty years ago, and since that time the Defense Mapping Agency has changed names a number of times and now probably produces far more digital products than printed products. For about four years, I was in map heaven. Trying to better track the production of maps lead me into a career in the information technology field that has since kept me well moneyed. Yet, my interest in maps never waned.
So naturally, I was quite agog when Google Earth was introduced in 2005. Who needs television when you can play with Google Earth instead? Since then, the product has gotten progressively better and their street views left me euphoric. Nevertheless, even a product as mature as Google Earth has some limitations. Want to plot a great circle route? There is no way to do it. Want to draw concentric lines around a point on the globe? Here again Google Earth falls short.
Most people don’t want to do these things, but I do. My frustration eventually turned up the GPS Visualizer site, a small work of wonder by itself, as it is a creation of one man, specifically Adam Schneider, who must also have my mapping bug. You can do all these things and more on the GPS Visualizer site.
Great circle routes fascinate me. In case you are not familiar with the term, this is the shortest distance between two points on the earth. The shortest path is not what you would think looking at your typical Cartesian map. You can sort of figure it out if you have a globe with a piece of string, but what you get is an approximation. In the northern hemisphere, trips to anywhere in Europe are typically flown far north of where you would expect them to fly. This is good. It saves the airline a lot of gas. Since the earth is not a perfect sphere, there are some minor errors in most calculations. Schneider has figured it all out and can produce extremely accurate Great Circle routes.
One of the things I like to do is draw great circle routes between far-flung airports. The routes airlines actually fly often differ quite a bit from great circle routes, mainly because in the United States the FAA designates that flights must follow standard routes. Still, you can get a good idea of your flight path by creating its great circle route. For fun, I tracked one of the more unusual flights I took, between JFK International in New York City and Narita airport in Tokyo, Japan. My flight was a bit south of the great circle route because at the time, the Soviet Union still existed and they were known to shoot down foreign aircraft that wandered into their air space. In addition, not all aircraft are certified to fly above the Arctic Circle. The great circle route for this flight though would scrape the top of the Bering Sea and pass over Vladivostok. Sadly, I remember little but clouds approaching Japan, but I only had the vaguest idea of where I was. In nearly fourteen hours in the air I looked down at a lot of frozen tundra while the sun hung largely in the same position in the west. It was disorienting, weird and wonderful, almost like being in outer space.
The GPS Visualizer site does lot of other neat geographic tricks. You can create a great circle map between any two points if you want, not just airports. You can type in two addresses and it will tell you the exact distance between them and give you an exact compass heading should you want to hoof it. It will draw elevation maps between two points. You can draw rings around a point at given distances. You can see the results in Google Earth by downloading the .kmz file it creates. You can also see it in Google Maps or get it in SVG, PNG and JPEG formats.
One thing I am discovering it that despite having over six billion people on the planet, most of our planet’s landmass is thinly populated. Last night as an experiment, I used the GPS Visualizer to draw lines exactly north and south of my house going ten thousand miles. I got the coordinates of my house out of Google Earth. I was curious who might be living one hundred, one thousand or five thousand miles due north or south from my house.
The answer: hardly anyone, except in the United States and even then, not that much. Five hundred miles south of my house is a point that looks like it is in the Bermuda triangle. At my longitude, the line cuts through Panama, but not through any populated places. It tracks through the Andes Mountains then disappears into the vastness of the Pacific Ocean. I then tracked it north. It came close to Rochester, then traveled over forests in Ontario, out into the tundra, over the pole, over Russia and Mongolia and did not hit anything resembling civilization until it reached Thailand. Even so, I hit no major cities.
Ideally, Google would put all these features into Google Earth. Perhaps some day they will because as good as the GPS Visualizer site is, it is just one guy having fun so it is a bit awkward to use at times. Still, to a man fascinated by maps like me its power combined with Google Earth give me a neat way to geek out. Try it out sometime. You may end up like me finding it oddly entertaining.
May 18th, 2010 at 08:43pm
Posted by
Mark |
Technology, Travel |
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Tags: Google Earth, GPS Visualizer, Maps
I have decided that if heaven exists, it should be a lot like The Homestead.
The Homestead is a resort that sits nestled among the Appalachians in Hot Springs, Virginia. It is in fact a very old resort. The first building for visitors was constructed near the hot springs in 1766, when we were not even a nation. In 1766, it was more like a fancy hunting lodge. In the intervening two hundred plus years, the resort has grown. It now caters to skiers, conventioneers looking for an unusual place to congregate and people with lots of money and leisure. For the rest of us, if we have some money burning a hole in our pockets, we can escape for a few days and live the life of the British aristocracy.
One thing is for sure, The Homestead is not an inexpensive place to visit, even during off-season. My wife and I just returned from spending two nights at The Homestead. The first few days of March are as empty as The Homestead probably ever gets. I would be surprised if ten percent of its eight hundred plus rooms were full. It turned out the dearth of people was something of a blessing, as the place is often packed during prime season and on the weekends. If you need a massage or even two, chances are you can be worked in without much problem during the first week of March. Nevertheless, do bring plenty of money because maintaining the high quality of the resort does not come cheap.
Over two centuries the resort has metastasized, in a good way. It’s sort of like being on a cruise ship, except the meals and most activities are not free. At least you do not have to worry about becoming seasick. There seems like a million things you can do at The Homestead, and most of them cost extra and include spending the day in the spa, having the kinks worked out of your muscles, skiing, falconry or playing golf. Perhaps the best thing to do is simply relax. A good place to relax is in The George Washington Room where, if so inclined, you can browse through an eclectic selection of books housed in cherry wood cabinets or play chess or checkers. Based on my experience, it is an excellent place to stretch out in a chaise lounge and snooze for an hour or two. Moreover, you won’t have to worry about CNN or Fox News playing on a nearby television to disturb your slumbers.
The Great Hall, the main entrance to the hotel, is truly grand. It comes with sixteen-foot ceilings, roman columns and plenty of comfortable chairs that invite intimate conversation. On cold days you can sit next to one of the many fireplaces, feel their heat and hear the wood crackle. Some of the more nerdy bring their laptops. At least in March, as a gentle wet snow fell outside, the Great Hall invited only peaceful contemplation. The Great Hall becomes a bit grander between three and four in the afternoon. This is tea time. A pianist sits down at the grand piano while waiters and waitresses (in black uniforms, of course) ask you very politely if you would like tea. A few minutes later, they return with a large silver tray laden with tea and tea biscuits, which you can sip like a proper British aristocrat, adding cream and a dash of lemon if you prefer.
With only two nights and with winter weather making most outdoor activities inadvisable, we spent most of our time indoors. Getting anywhere was an adventure because you have to traverse numerous long hallways and staircases. This resort is not for the vertically challenged, although there are elevators you can take if needed. In early March, the hallways were mostly eerily silent. However, we did eventually find the spa (where my wife enjoyed a Swedish massage), the exercise room (where I spent two hours working out), the bowling alley (where we played pool and I lost twice), the movie theater (showing mostly G-rated family films) as well as many other rooms and alcoves that range from ornate to intimate. In them you could relax, look at old paintings on the wall, or lapse into a comfy chair. Dark paneling is de rigueur at The Homestead.
Overall, the standards are quite high at The Homestead. Most rooms are standard size but some suites are available. Our room came with an exceptionally comfortable king sized bed and a very large flat panel television on which standard definition cable channels looked somewhat stretched and silly. Perhaps the high definition channels will show up in time. Regardless, we rarely have slept so well in a hotel bed, but our sleep was also enhanced by the relatively few hotel occupants. For the most part, the hotel is an example of how well you can preserve and modernize a massive but aged resort if you spend enough money and can give it enough attention. Clearly, there is no lack of money at this resort. The only mystery is how they keep the place so immaculate. I imagine the cleaning crew mostly works only at night because they were certainly absent during the day.
Unsurprisingly, you will find excellent dining at The Homestead. You had best bring some fancy duds with you, because they won’t let just anyone into The Dining Room for dinner. Gentlemen are expected to wear shoes, a collared shirt and a sport coat or suit. Don’t expect a salad bar, but you can order salad as a second course if you prefer. Do expect to find the staff impeccably groomed, a three-piece band playing button down music (show tunes were popular last night) and modestly sized entrees of very high quality. For those with looser feet than mine, there is also a modest-sized dance floor to enjoy.
Breakfast in the same room is much less formal and more pedestrian, with a large breakfast bar full of the foods you crave. Even with all the usual temptations like eggs and hash browns, I found the fresh fruit alone to have been worth the $25 cost of the meal. The taste of this morning’s fresh strawberries, pineapple and blueberries still linger on my tongue.
We could have easily spent a week at The Homestead, but we are not yet independently wealthy. Between the wonderful but expensive meals, extras like massages, various resort packages you can choose from, the dubious “activity fee” and the room rate, a couple can spend $500 a day without any problem, and it is easy to spend considerably more. However, if you have the money, you should feel no qualms about spending it because The Homestead offers no compromises in providing a first class resort experience. While the money holds out, you can buy yourself the sort of lifestyle you have always wanted but could not quite afford.
The Homestead has hosted over twenty presidents as well as celebrities that seem countless (many of whom can be found in pictures on the limitless walls), but also has its dark side. Most recently, on March 21, 2009, Beacher F. Hackney, a resort employee, allegedly shot and killed two of his supervisors. He is currently #1 on America’s Most Wanted fugitives and is still at large.
We would have liked to have more time to spend at The Homestead, but this short mini-vacation amounted to a quick getaway to reconnect and de-stress. We look forward to a return trip as soon as our bank account recovers.
March 3rd, 2010 at 05:28pm
Posted by
Mark |
Travel |
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Tags: Hot Springs Virginia, The Homestead
One of the downsides of traveling on your employer’s dime is you rarely get to choose a decent airline. Since most of my business travel takes me to Denver, I am usually on one of our contract flights between Denver and Washington Dulles, which means I am on United Airlines.
United is one of these airlines which, if I were to grade it, would rank somewhere between a C and a D. Sadly, most of the domestic airlines here in the United States would rank between a C and a D. The good part about flying United is you pretty much know what you are going to get. Since my employer will not pay for business class, I will be back in economy. Since I am six foot two inches, I know my knees will be rubbing up against the seat in front of me. Trying to check in, whether online or at the airport, and I will be nagged to purchase “Economy Plus” seating. Because they can, United will also charge for bags: $15 for the first bag, $25 for each additional bag. These baggage fees have become quite popular and essentially are a way to raise your ticket prices without broadcasting it.
Fly United and you expect that the airplane is likely to be dirty, except in business and first class. If you want a meal, expect to pay $9 or so, assuming they are offering one, and do not expect it to be large or particularly memorable. Otherwise, all you get is a beverage service. Movies are scattershot, and generally available only on the longer flights, but at least they are free. Their wide-body aircraft generally have personal TV screens where you can select from some canned entertainment; otherwise, you are left to your own amusement. While their skies are not exactly friendly, they are not overtly hostile either.
Which is why my short flights on jetBlue to and from Boston last week was such a noticeable change for the better. Since I could not find a contract flight, I had to book an out of network flight instead, and jetBlue had the most convenient time and the best price. Given its low-ticket price I was expecting something like United Airlines or worse.
I could not have been more surprised. jetBlue is a civilized airline. First, there is no artificial distinction between coach, business and first class. As with a few other airlines like Southwest, there is only one class available. It was weird to walk into an airplane with no artificial bulkhead between premier seats and those of us in the cattle car section. The seats were all three across, upholstered in leather and actually left a few inches between my knees and the seat in front of me. Nor was the seat artificially narrow. Not that it was wide, but it was comfortable. Some airlines (and Northwest comes to mind as a particularly egregious example) will torture you by trying to jam you into 22 or 23-inch wide seats.
At least for my flights, the cabin was absent the usual detritus of napkins on the floor and reminders of previous passengers in the seatback pocket. The welcome boarding the plane seemed at least half-heartfelt. I never felt that on United. Settling into my seat, I found that I had my own personal TV with several dozen satellite channels available. If I did not want to watch satellite TV, I had XM satellite radio to choose from instead. This suited me just fine and I settled into the XM National Public Radio channel.
On-time departures are problematical with any airline, but my flights left a minute or two ahead of schedule and arrived on time or a little early. On the brief flight, we had a choice of either chocolate chip cookies or jetBlue’s proprietary blue-tinted potato chips. The beverages are announced at the start of the flight, and are usually somewhat limited, but include bottled water.
On the longer flights, if you want to see a movie you have to pay for the privilege, although there is plenty of entertainment on the satellite channels, just rife with commercials. You also have to pay $2 for earphones if you do not own any and want to listen to the entertainment. Overall, my experience on jetBlue was what passed for a high quality airline experience these days. It was weird. It was like they actually cared a bit about my flying satisfaction.
Southwest was the only other airline where I have felt something similar. Granted this is a relatively recent phenomenon. Southwest used to be infamous as the cattle car express, and they still have a bizarre policy where there is no assigned seating, meaning that you tend to arrive extra early to have the first chance to board. Even so, Southwest is at best a B- of an airline. jetBlue ranked a solid B.
If there are A-rated airlines out there, they are likely foreign carriers. Since I do little foreign travel, I have little to compare but I was impressed with IcelandAir a few years ago. Most domestic airlines seem to be flyer-hostile, or at least exhibit a passive aggressive side through tactics like usury baggage fees and premier seating that simply means your knees have an inch or two to spare. On jetBlue, the first bag is free, providing it does not exceed fifty pounds. (The second bag is $30. The third is $75.)
The only part of the jetBlue experience I found annoying was the commercials. JetBlue will commandeer your TV at certain points during the ascent and descent and subject you to annoying ads. You cannot turn the TV off, but you can at least unplug your headset and look elsewhere for a while.
Those of us older travelers cannot help but feel wistful for a time when the standards were much higher. In the early 1980s, I would annually fly Delta Airlines to Florida. Back in coach we were served real breakfasts. The food was provided hot in ceramic containers. You got real silverware and linens too, as well as a choice of meals and condiments. Moreover, all this came with the price of a ticket. There were no baggage fees at all for the first couple of bags. (This year I flew Delta to Salt Lake City and I can assure you they are busy emulating United Airlines.)
Those days are likely gone for good. Meanwhile, if you have to travel domestically and do most of your traveling back in the coach section see if you can fly jetBlue. You may at least get a hint of what real airline service used to feel like. When I have a choice, I will be booking jetBlue in the future.
October 12th, 2009 at 10:58am
Posted by
Mark |
Travel |
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Tags: Airlines, Delta Airlines, jetBlue, Southwest Airlines, United Airines
During the summer of 2008, my family took a roadtrip to Beantown, stopping along the way at artsy places like Mount Gretna, Pennsylvania and lowlife way stations like the Ghosthunters show storefront in beautiful (well, actually kind of ugly) downtown Warwick, Rhode Island.
This week I finally had a reason to fly into Beantown, a.k.a. Boston, Massachusetts. Beantown turned out to be a way station to my real destination, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, which sits on the southern side of Cape Cod. There I spent three days in a lovely conference room and spent my evenings wandering around Woods Hole and nearby Falmouth. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute sits in what is probably the most bucolic campus in the country, with dozens of lovely building surrounded by maple and oak trees, joined by lovely walkways and with the Atlantic Ocean just a fifteen minute walk away.
As I told my daughter, I enjoy my short distance business trips the best. The shortest ones generally occur in my own time zone, and I can get there with a direct flight, generally lasting an hour or so. Getting there does not swallow most of my day. As it turned out, it took longer to drive between Boston’s Logan airport and Falmouth (where we stayed) than it did to fly between Washington Dulles and Boston. There were no weather or aircraft delays, just routine traffic delays trying to drive out of Boston during rush hour.
Cape Cod is further away from Boston than I thought. I imagined you could glimpse it from Boston Harbor but I doubt that is true, at least not at surface level. It is further east and further south than I imagined. Falmouth, where we stayed, turned out to be a lovely and typical New England town with plenty of stores, galleries and restaurants designed mostly for tourist season. In October, while the tourist traffic was somewhat off, the locals were friendly, looked well moneyed and were overwhelmingly white.
The citizens of this part of Massachusetts are an unfailingly polite group, or so it appeared to this visitor. A walk down the Shining Sea Bike Path into Woods Hole led to many pleasant greetings from fellow residents. Woods Hole is small and exclusive enough to make it nigh impossible to park without a permit. It is also a harbor town. Aside from serving oceanographic interests, it acts as a conduit for tourists to and residents of Martha’s Vineyard. For $7.50 you can board a ferry that will deposit you on the island. Make sure you also purchase a return trip and not miss the 9:30 PM ferry, or you may be in for a long and cold night. Particularly during the summer season, without a reservation you cannot count on a room at Martha’s Vineyard.
I looked hard to find things to dislike about this part of Cape Cod. Most towns in New England come complete with a picturesque town square or commons, which offer a lovely dose of tamed nature in what would otherwise be a busy part of town. In Falmouth, my group found plenty of old churches, meeting halls and restaurants. Dinner at The Quarterdeck in Falmouth revealed a tavern populated not by tourists but by locals, all of whom seemed to be on intimate terms with each other. There was not a hint of crime or litter in Falmouth. Nor could I complain that the town felt fake. Steeped in hundreds of years of history, it cannot help but be authentic. Nor, after walking its long main street, I could I find a chain restaurant, a real plus. If you do not enjoy seafood, you would probably be happier elsewhere, but if you do enjoy seafood you are blessed with abundant and fresh seafood at local restaurants, which you can watch being hauled in at harbors like Woods Hole.
If forced to find items to complain about, one could make the case that the local roundabouts found on the Cape as well as much of New England, while quaint, are annoying and create backups at certain parts of the day. I also checked the local real estate prices. The riff raff are apparently easy to keep away because they cannot afford to live in this area. It helps to inherit a relative’s property or to have a six figure income. Otherwise you probably cannot afford to live in this area, despite its conspicuous absence of supersized houses.
This second trip to New England in less than two years made me realize again that New England is loudly calling for me to settle there. Fortunately, it is also calling my wife, which means we will be looking at retiring, if not in some charming Cape Cod town like Falmouth, then somewhere in New England, providing we can afford it. While there are definitely some not so nice areas of New England (such as Revere, where Logan Airport sits) much of it is charming and inviting to those who like a northern climate.
I imagine New England gets much less charming in the winter, particularly during its abundant snow season. I suspect much of its charm would wear off after shoveling snow several times a week. Most people retire from places like Boston, not to these places. I may find that the milder climate of Northern Virginia where we now live is much better overall.
Still, now that I have an exposure to New England, I want to live here. It will be hard to convince myself to spend my retired years somewhere else.
October 9th, 2009 at 04:45pm
Posted by
Mark |
Travel |
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Tags: Boston, Cape Cod, Falmouth MA, New England, Woods Hole MA
Perhaps when you were young you had dreams similar to mine. The nightmare rarely varied and they were always ended the same way: I would end up falling off something very high and feeling very panicked, knowing I was about to die. In the dream, I never quite actually met the bottom of the cliff and my maker. Perhaps they were a result of watching too many Road Runner cartoons, or perhaps they were vestigial memories of being in utero.
Perhaps this explains my vertigo. I am fine peering down over something from way up high, providing there is a guardrail or something similar to inhibit my fall. Otherwise I am incapable of getting near the edge of anything with a precipitous drop.
This phobia makes little sense as I can and do fly frequently. In fact, if the weather is nice, I prefer a window seat. Only a couple times have a felt panicky in an airplane, and only during moderate or severe turbulence.
I only rarely experience vertigo, mainly because I deal with it through rigorous avoidance. Occasionally though I have no choice. For those of us who suffer from vertigo, you should avoid Trail Ridge Road in The Rocky Mountain National Park. Up there above the tree line at altitudes from 10,000 to 12,000 feet there are miles of road where you drive literally along the side of the mountain with not so much as a guardrail between you, your car and careening thousands of feet down the side of the Rocky Mountains to certain death. Moreover you may be shadowed by tailgaters because you are going the speed limit of 35 mph and they want you to go faster. In short, if you suffer from vertigo like me the drive will be nerve wracking and heart pounding, and that is assuming that the weather is fine, which it often isn’t. The wind has been clocked at up to 150 mph at the Alpine Ridge Visitors Center, and you can get snow, hail or sleet on the road at any time of the year.
View from Alpine Ridge Vistors Center
Granted, if you want to kill yourself, you should have a spectacular view on the vertical descent. You may piss off a few elk, big horn sheep and moose on the tundra on your way down. Yet, even if you suffer from vertigo, you might want to take Trail Ridge Road anyhow, for few roads command such a breathtaking view. You are only guardrail-less for a few miles and once you get below the tree line the feelings of vertigo should recede. Trail Ridge Road is as close as many of us ordinary mortals will get to being on top of the world.
The Alpine Ridge Visitors Center is only publicly accessible during the short summer months. During the winter the road is closed. The snowdrifts can extend up to thirty five feet above the road. It takes the National Park Service months to make the road drivable during its short driving season. As I discovered, even in August the weather can be bracing at the Alpine Ridge Visitors Center so bring a jacket and gloves. If you are not too faint from the thin air, you can take a trail a thousand feet or so to the summit and, like me (see picture) perch next to a sign that tells you that you are at 12,005 feet above sea level. This is likely as high up as I will get in my life.
Me at the top of Alpine Ridge
When you vacation around The Rocky Mountains, you have to expect to be altitude challenged. I have flown to Denver enough times to no longer notice the thinner air, but move a couple thousand feet higher and I found myself short of breath and my heart racing, even while sitting still. East of The Rocky Mountain National Park is the city of Estes Park, which sits 7500 feet above sea level. My wife and I spent two nights in this mountain-lined city but even at that modest altitude my wife and I noticed the change in elevation.
Estes Park, a beautiful touristy city with expansive views, is something of a low altitude city compared to the last destination of our journey, Leadville, Colorado. Leadville is the highest incorporated city in the continental United States at 10,200 feet in elevation. It sits below the tree line, but not much below it. My wife and I spent a night in The Ice Palace Inn, one of dozens of bed and breakfasts in Leadville, a historic mining town that was once the largest city in the state and its presumed state capital. Even in August the weather in Leadville was bracing with cool blustery westerly winds and evening temperatures in the forties. Much of its lower temperature was likely due to its high altitude. Leadville can make an east coast guy like me feel humbled, for you can be at rest and still find yourself breathing heavily and your heart racing. Monday we took the Leadville, Colorado and Southern Railroad ride 900 feet higher into the mountains. While the view was breathtaking, you will probably find yourself hyperventilating out of necessity. I found myself constantly taking deep breaths. We were grateful later in the day to be back with my brother and his wife in Boulder at a mere 5400 feet.
Today we fly back to low altitude Northern Virginia where we can breathe effortlessly again. Our trip out west exceeded both our expectations. In addition to the places I documented, we also spent two nights in Laramie, Wyoming at a B&B called The Mad Carpenter Inn, absolutely the best B&B where we have ever stayed. There we toured the well restored Ivinson Victorian Mansion, a local art museum and the Wyoming Territorial Prison (a far more interesting a place than it sounds) which housed many a ruffian including Butch Cassidy. Overall Wyoming is a beautiful state, if vastly underpopulated and very dry by east coast standards. The whole state has just 533,000 people in it. By contrast, the county I live in, Fairfax County in Northern Virginia, has over a million inhabitants. To go from one city to another in Montana usually requires a journey by car of several hours. There are no large cities in the state, with Cheyenne being its largest at about 53,000 residents.
We were amazed by the friendliness of people we met. We found it disarmingly easy to slip into intimate conversations with relative strangers. Perhaps the lack of people in states like Wyoming makes people naturally friendlier and inquisitive. In Estes Park, Colorado we had continental breakfasts at a Comfort Inn with the same two couples two mornings in a row. One couple left us their name and address so we could visit them in Western Nebraska.
The West has much to teach us somewhat insular East Coasters, including the somewhat lost art of friendliness. We will be back again. Perhaps we will retire out here.
August 18th, 2009 at 01:37pm
Posted by
Mark |
Travel |
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Tags: Colorado, Estes Park, Laramie, Leadville, Wyoming
Small town America used to be ubiquitous. Even if you are fortunate enough to live in a small town, it has probably changed for the worse over the years. The Wal-Mart just outside the town might have made Main Street a sad and mostly boarded up place. Or you could live in a small city like this one where the principle industry went elsewhere leaving behind a poor tax base and lots of boarded up houses. So when you find an authentic and healthy small town in America today that feels kind of like Mayberry, it should be noted.
My wife and I rediscovered small town America by spending a night in Buffalo, Wyoming, population three thousand or so as well as the Johnson County seat. I picked Buffalo as a place to spend the night on our vacation because we had planned our day around visiting Devil’s Tower National Monument in northeastern Wyoming. Devil’s Tower was so worth the trip, but finding a good place to stay near Devil’s Tower was next to impossible unless you had an RV. So instead we chose to drive two hours to its west, to the town of Buffalo, and sleep there instead.
Main Street in Buffalo, Wyoming
Buffalo is an eastern gateway into Yellowstone National Park. The Bighorn Mountains frame its western horizon. The aptly named Clear Creek runs through the center of town. Its clean and abundant mountain waters doubtless made it a logical center for commerce in the area. Our destination was The Occidental Hotel on Main Street. To call it just a hotel is to give it short shrift. It is a hotel, a saloon, a fine dining establishment and perhaps most importantly something of a private museum. The hotel was actually constructed in the 19th century. Among its early guests were the western notables Calamity Jane, Butch Cassidy, The Sundance Kid and Buffalo Bill Cody. No less than two U.S. presidents have also slept in the Occidental Hotel. You can find and sleep in Teddy Roosevelt’s suite on the upper level, or if you prefer sleep in the somewhat humbler Herbert Hoover Suite on its lower level.
We chose the Herbert Hoover Suite. Hoover is infamous as the president at the start of The Great Depression, so perhaps sleeping in his room was not that great a privilege. He was campaigning for reelection in Wyoming when he arrived at The Occidental Hotel in 1932. In the room you can see pictures of him somewhat overweight and in a full suit and tie.
It was a strange experience to spend a night in a room inhabited, however briefly, by a president of the United States. The original claw footed bathtub is still there, so I stripped and showered in the same place as a U.S. president. I am sure the bed has been replaced since the 1930s but presumably we were sleeping in the same spot as President Hoover as well. The room, like all the rooms in the hotel, feels very early 20th century. Our room came complete with a number of old books, including a book about “The World War”, which when it was published meant World War One. Inside it was a letter postmarked in 1918 from the original owner of the hotel. This, the old fashioned radio, the antique furniture, and the ancient wooden flooring that creaked under you as you walked on it made it feel absolutely authentic which, in fact, it was. The room’s only defect was its walls, which were authentically wooden with no soundproofing. Fortunately by ten p.m. the hotel had quieted down. This and my silicon earplugs ensured that my sleep would be undisturbed.
The hotel sells its history and ambiance as well as a night’s rest. The clerks behind the counter are exceptionally friendly. In the hotel lobby, rife with antique furniture, you can play a game of chess or gaze at the many stuffed animal heads on its walls. Pre-ragtime music sounding like it came off a Victrola can be heard overhead. The hallways abound with vintage pictures and historical documents, most of them marking events of notables staying at the hotel.
A trip into the adjoining saloon reveals the hotel’s likely naughty past. A large painting of a naked woman hangs on the wall. Perhaps she was a naughty lady of the house that could be found in many western hotels and saloons in the 19th century. Today the saloon attracts a higher class of clientele, who principally are guests of the hotel. Its counters and floors gleam. In a room in the back is a pool table that might have been heavily used a century ago. Next to the saloon is The Virginian, a restaurant affiliated with the hotel, which is doubtless the best dining available in Buffalo, and probably within a hundred miles. My wife and I enjoyed steak dinners in our own private dining alcove. Appropriately, my wife chose a buffalo steak.
On the hotel’s patio are two sets of rocking chairs where you can enjoy watching life on Main Street pass by. You can hear Clear Creek babbling to your right. During the evening, horse drawn carriage rides are available for a modest fee, which you can conveniently board at the hotel. Or you can amble up and down its considerable Main Street, stopping if you wish at a local ice cream parlor. The closest thing you will find to a chain store on Main Street in Buffalo is a Rexall Drug. In the evening you may notice, as we did, an owl perched on the top of the court house.
The character of Buffalo is borne out simply by crossing the street. Motorists will happily stop to let you cross, even if you are jaywalking. Eat breakfast as we did at the Main Street Diner and you may find a kindly local willing to move a seat down on the counter to make room for you. The Main Street Diner, like the Occidental Hotel, is an experience that should not to be missed. Behind the counter are four very hard working people serving twenty to thirty patrons. Our young blonde waitress was efficient, pleasant and personable. I found her interesting to observe, her hands constantly in motion as she orchestrated the complex process of serving all the patrons, managing the counters, calculating all the tabs (on paper) and processing all the payments. If you like getting great value for your money, you will find it at The Main Street Diner. The portions are beyond enormous. I ordered a western omelet, to find fully stretched across an enormous plate, along with toast and hash browns hanging on the side. It was good but I only ate half of it, certain I was already consuming far more fat and calories than I should. Perhaps the portions were sized assuming you were going to spend the rest of the day roping steers rather than driving a rental car.
In short, our brief stay in Buffalo, Wyoming made us wish we had booked a second night at The Occidental Hotel. To me, if felt very much like I was in a time warp. From the nearby City Hall to the county courthouse built in 1886 next door, to the elegant grand hotel itself, to the babbling brook, to the nostalgic diner on Main Street, it struck a resonant chord of comfort in my heart. I did not find Sheriff Taylor or Floyd’s Barber Shop, but perhaps I did not look hard enough. However, I did find boys biking along Main Street, blissfully unaware of how special their authentic small town experience actually was.
If you were to drop Mayberry somewhere in the West, you would most likely find it in Buffalo. I feel like I left some part of my heart in the town, and I sure hope I live long enough to return for a proper and extended visit.
August 13th, 2009 at 09:51am
Posted by
Mark |
Travel |
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Tags: Buffalo Wyoming, Occidental Hotel Buffalo Wyoming, Wyoming
For most of us air travelers, America’s north central states are just flyover country. I have flown over the Dakotas more times than I can count. Yet until Sunday I had never set foot in the Dakotas. Perhaps this is because they are so hard to get to. The airlines give the Dakotas short shrift, making flying into these unpopulated states difficult and expensive. So we fly over them instead and mostly what we see out the airplane window seems featureless.
Yet, the western side of South Dakota is anything but flat. It is framed by The Black Hills, which push up against Wyoming’s eastern edge. While not quite The Rocky Mountains, The Black Hills are an appealing destination nonetheless. There is a surprising amount to do in The Black Hills. A family could easily spend a week or more there without feeling like they had seen it all.
Getting to The Black Hills from our starting point of Boulder, Colorado (where my wife and I spent a couple days with my brother Tom and his wife) made for a memorable driving journey through the eastern half of Wyoming. It takes about six hours of driving to get to Rapid City, South Dakota from Boulder. You pass through hundreds of miles of empty land. It is not empty desert as you might find in Nevada, just miles of buttes with virtually no people and little in the way of trees to obscure your view. This is big sky country. For a while The Rocky Mountains shadow you to your west, and then they recede altogether. I-25 reveals a land dappled with vegetation which is not quite desert. Occasionally you pass picturesque places like the Platt River, but mostly the area consists of enormous ranches where widely scattered groups of cattle graze. For an east coast guy like me, Wyoming is appealing for its remoteness and its feeling of being unspoiled. It is not quite unspoiled. If it were unspoiled, it would be rife with bison and Native Americans on horseback. The bison were hunted to near extinction long ago and the Native Americans are now largely sequestered on Indian reservations on far less interesting land. Eastern Wyoming is a pacified west, with only an occasional oil derrick to spoil its majestic view.
Pass from Wyoming into South Dakota and not only do you find yourself in the gently rolling Black Hills, but you also feel you are in a different climate. Wyoming feels dry but South Dakota, at least its western side, receives more rain, so there is more vegetation, more green things on the fields and plenty of pine trees and gently winding roads. Yet like Wyoming, it still feels remote. This is something of an illusion. While South Dakota remains one of our least populated states, if you travel through The Black Hills you will find plenty of tacky tourist traps, roadside family restaurants, inexpensive campgrounds as well as some first class tourist attractions.
My wife and I took in three such attractions on Monday, working from our home base, a Country Inn & Suites in Rapid City. Rapid City, like The Black Hills near which is sits, is a pleasant city in its own right. While the East Coast sweltered under a heat wave, we enjoyed blue skies, dry weather and highs around eighty degrees. There are lots of dead presidents in Rapid City. Since it is something of a way station for people on their way to Mount Rushmore, it plays up its association with U.S. presidents by placing metal sculptures of presidents on its street corners. It is also a thoroughly white area of the country. If you are Anglo Saxon, you will find plenty of your own ethnicity in this state. Rapid City also ensures that you have to wade through plenty of traffic lights on your way to Mount Rushmore. Naturally there are plenty of businesses catering to tourists along Mount Rushmore Road. We noted some pretty inane tourist attractions, including a Cosmos Mystery Area and an Old MacDonald’s Farm that would make even Mr. Rogers retch.
Mount Rushmore
Mount Rushmore remains a worthy destination, but what makes it distinctive is not just the chiseled images of four great presidents on the face of The Black Hills, but its frame of the beautiful Black Hills themselves. One can of course marvel at the engineering involved in making Mount Rushmore back in the 1930s, but the geography only allows you to see it from a few angles. There is a large promenade and theater which sits before the mountain that will tell you more than you probably want to know about the memorial, and a trail you can take with many steps that will take you half way up the mountain, but no further. You can look at models of the memorial in a sculptor’s studio.
Crazy Horse Memorial
To my mind, far more impressive is the Crazy Horse Memorial some twenty miles away, which sits atop its own mountain not too far from the town of Custer. It is a work in progress. Some sixty years since construction began, the memorial consists mainly of Chief Crazy Horse’s head and an exposed tunnel of granite. When completed, this memorial will dwarf Mount Rushmore. In fact it will be in the largest chiseled work of art in the world, surpassing even the Great Pyramids. Construction might have proceeded at a faster pace had Korczak Ziolkowski, the obsessed visionary who also helped chisel Mount Rushmore not spurned government money. The Ziolkowski family still directs work on the mountain, and supports its construction primarily with fees contributed by visitors. At $10 a person or $27 for a carload, it looks like the project will remain well funded through private sources. For an extra $4 you can take a bus ride to the base of the memorial, or you can observe it from a distance, and enjoy the many buildings on its campus. It is hard to find fault with the project, which seeks to honor a distinguished and fiercely independent Native American chief for all posterity. There are many Native American artists selling amazing works of art on premises. The scope of the project is audacious and is unlikely to be completed in my lifetime, or even my daughter’s. To get a sense of the scale of the project, Crazy Horse’s face, which has been completed, is much larger than the engravings on Mount Rushmore itself. Still one cannot feel more than a bit humbled by the size and scope of this amazing engineering endeavor and labor of love. I do hope that one day it is fully realized. If so it will be a new wonder of the world.
Jewel Cave National Monument
After seeing so much enormous statuary, we were glad to end our day underground touring Jewel Cave, also located in The Black Hills. The Crazy Horse Memorial and Mount Rushmore are monuments to man’s audacity and ambitiousness. Jewel Cave is a monument to Mother Nature, who has the luxury of time to dazzle us with underground delights. Over the years I have gone on a number of cave tours, but our tour of Jewel Cave was by far the most extensive and interesting of the bunch. Jewel Cave is enormous, measuring 146 miles. It is likely a lot larger, since based on air pressure calculations only about three percent of the cave has been mapped. The site was designated as a national monument by President Teddy Roosevelt, so it is perhaps fitting that his face is chiseled in granite on nearby Mount Rushmore. Two elevators take tourists down nearly three hundred feet below the visitor’s center. We had an excellent park ranger who guided us on a ninety minute tour of the cavern. We marveled at the diversity of rock formations and crystals in the cave, which is second in size only to Mammouth Cave in Kentucky. Having the cave managed by the National Park Service made quite a difference compared to places I am more familiar with that were privately run. The park ranger provided a great deal of cave history and explanations for the natural works we witnessed. The extensive sets of staircases made traversing the cave as painless as possible. The forty nine degree temperature made it invigorating after being outside all day.
If you have been flying over South Dakota like me, you are doing yourself a disservice by not stopping by for a proper visit. It is time to consider South Dakota as a vacation destination. For those enamored with natural wonders, there is much in South Dakota to enchant and delight.
August 11th, 2009 at 09:31am
Posted by
Mark |
Travel |
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Tags: Black Hills, Crazy Horse Memorial, Jewel Cave, Mount Rushmore, Rapid City, South Dakota, Wyoming
Salt Lake City is one of the great cities to arrive at by air. You descend over the tops of the Rocky Mountains. You feel like your plane may scrape one of the summits, and then gently descend into the Salt Valley. Even in late June you can still see some snow on the mountains. The city unfolds around you as you approach from the south. Out the window I watched the Great Salt Lake glimmering in a setting sun. Unlike the busy hub of Atlanta where I had left, Salt Lake’s airport is rather serene in the evening. It is also unusually close to the center of the city. A few volunteers with the Unitarian Universalist Association greeted me as I descend toward baggage claim. They noticed my Serenity T-shirt and giggled. They should have known I was a UU just from the T-shirt. A shuttle to my hotel awaited. Fifteen minutes later I was at my hotel, the Little America Hotel in downtown Salt Lake City on a warm and dry Tuesday night.
Salt Lake has grown up since 1996. The Salt Palace Convention Center is still there but the mall across the street has been torn down. Condominium skyscrapers are going up in their place. Some of these buildings are so high that they tower over nearby Temple Square, a sort of Vatican City for Mormons. All this construction suggests that mammon may be Utah’s real religion. Yet within a block or two of the convention center there are plentiful vacant storefronts. Utah, like much of the west, is hurting in this economy. Still, the city seems to be shrugging off hard times and building for a boom they have faith will arrive eventually. Its leaders are thinking strategically. There was no light rail system back in 1996, but it has arrived in 2009. I can pick it up at a stop a block from my hotel, but it is better to walk the five blocks or so to the convention center for exercise.
Unitarian Universalists from across the world have arrived in Salt Lake to occupy the city, or at least its downtown. The plentiful Mormons are happy to have our business, and seem a happy bunch in general. I know I am not in Northern Virginia when I cross the street at a crosswalk in the middle of the block and the cars actually stop. In Northern Virginia or DC such a brazen act would likely get you run over. Their economy may be close to being in shambles, but the people of Salt Lake City never forget their manners. Even the tough looking types will offer a pleasantry when you pass them on the street.
The UUs tried to string a five story high banner from the convention center, but it didn’t quite work. “Standing on the side of love” is the theme of this General Assembly. One of the ways we are standing on the side of love is by standing up for marriage equality for same sex partners. In this reddest state in the Union, this could be dangerous. Salt Lake City though is a tiny dot of blue in an otherwise deeply red state. It has two versions of a city paper and a progressive Democratic mayor. Perhaps this is because the city, white as Wonder Bread back in 1996, is now becoming a tad Pumpernickel. African Americans can be seen unloading baggage at Salt Lake City airport, and Hispanics can be found as hotel maids and working at the local Wendys. Perhaps the whites of Salt Lake City no longer wanted these jobs.
A few of us representing the Reston, Virginia contingent of Unitarian Universalists manage to meet up Wednesday night in the exposition hall at the Salt Palace Center. As this is my first General Assembly it is both exciting and comforting. I am very much at home, with or without members of my church, for we speak a common language and share similar values. It has gotten to the point that I can spend five minutes or so with anyone and tell with an eighty percent probability whether they are a UU or not. The normal signs would be a hybrid automobile and a Darwin fish on the rear fender, but in person you can often tell from the way they look – it’s a certain crease around the eyes. There are other clues, like the chalice that many are wearing as jewelry. The flaming chalice is the symbol of Unitarian Universalism.
Still, there is a big difference between attending a service at your local church and being in the presence of four thousand other UUs at an opening plenary session and service. Frankly, I found it a bit overwhelming. The plenary session started out with a banner procession. Each congregation has a banner and they paraded around the enormous room with their banners to the great applause of fellow UUs. While the vast majority of UUs are centered in the United States, we had UUs from Africa, Europe and the Philippines in attendance also. Outgoing UUA president William Sinkford delivered a report to the membership that I found surprisingly stirring. You might think a relatively small faith like ours might not have made much of an impact these last eight years, but you would be wrong. From opposing the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to being at the vanguard of marriage equality, to our outreach to the Muslim community, UUs have made great strides under Rev. Sinkford’s leadership. We also have had two unwitting martyrs. A new association president is to be voted in later this week. The campaigning is hot and heavy on the convention floor. Should we choose a Hispanic man or our first woman as president? Either one, like the African American Bill Sinkford, would demonstrate that our largely white congregation is becoming more inclusive.
It is not often that you attend a worship service with four thousand people. Only the pope gets bigger venues. The service, which followed the plenary session, was both stirring and moving. Hearing our signature hymn, “Spirit of Life” sung in four different language (including Hungarian) was touching, as was the “Passing of Peace” where we offered peace to the people sitting around us, in some cases going more than a few rows back. The service had the theme of atonement. Unitarians were one of the religions selected to help “civilize” Native Americans after they were sent to reservations in the 19th century. In retrospect, this was a great injustice. We made a public apology and had our apology accepted by one of the native tribes. There were few dry eyes in the house.
The exhibition hall showed me the amazing diversity of UUs. There were booths for pretty much every conceivable variation of UU you could imagine, from the humanists, to the Buddhists, to the UUs who think Jesus was divine, to the polyamorists.
Ironically, UUs are still largely silent about the polyamory community. If they are going to stand up for love, why not for those who want to love more than one human being at the same time? Right now we are being largely silent. I imagine this will change in time too. I spoke to the polyamorous UUs and told them I couldn’t figure out how they could juggle more than one loving relationship at a time. They are certainly charting a brave new frontier in love.
Today I attended three seminars, but by far the most interesting was the Theology for a Secular Age course, part of the UU University series. It is being taught by the minister of the All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church in New York City, the Rev. Galen Guengerich. He may be the best speaker I have ever had the pleasure of listening to, a man of great learning and insight. The seminar resumes tomorrow at eight a.m. so I must be to bed early. I don’t want to miss a word!
Tomorrow will be another day of fellowship and learning.
June 25th, 2009 at 10:28pm
Posted by
Mark |
Life 2009, Sociology, Travel |
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Tags: Mormons, Salt Lake City, Unitarian Universalism, Utah
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