very simple

I haven’t done a non-photo related post in some time, but I just finished my latest book while sitting in the cafe at barnes and noble, and was reflecting on how nutso this week is going to be.

First, the travel. As always for thanksgiving, I’m heading to the berkshires to hang with family. Except, instead of staying through Sunday as I would normally do, I’m flying to Houston on Friday, because one of my oldest friends is getting (re)married down there on saturday. And then i’m flying back to NY on Sunday. Of thanksgiving weekend. I’m thinking it’s a good thing I don’t have a job I’ll need to actually get to on Monday.

Actually, that’s about it for my nutso week, now that I think about it. Although apparently my brother is sick with something that may be the flu (swine or otherwise) and is only finally going to the doctor because my dad convinced my brother’s girlfriend to drag him there. Or an emergency room. I’ll have to call him later to check on him. I’m not going within 100 feet of him though, because I’m pretty sure that swine flu makes a pretty crappy wedding present.

I’ll return to photoblogging later with a post about the book I just finished, but I left the jacket at home so I can’t photograph it yet.

not really, but this is definitely weird.

A few years ago, I thought it was incredibly fortuitous timing that they published a travel article on spending the weekend in Paris mere days before I went to Paris. crazy, convenient coincidence, right?

But now it’s just getting creepy. I’m going to Philly next weekend for my 10-year law school reunion, and what do they publish this morning? Yep…36 hours in Philadelphia.

In all seriousness though, I’m not sure why they thought it was a good idea to encourage people to visit philadelphia in mid-may, which is the height of graduation/reunion frenzy. The few remaining hotels that aren’t booked solid are probably either incredibly sketchy or have super-exorbitant prices. But I’ll probably print out the ideas on the off-chance that I’ve got some downtime somewhere in my reunion-weekend schedule.

I’m getting better. It has only taken me one month to sort through my photos and get them posted on the site. Pictures from my diving trip to Roatan are now available for viewing. In addition, I shot some underwater video on my camera, which I’m including here. The first part is just your general diving experience, getting to sound like darth vader. The remainder is from the dolphin dive that I had the opportunity to do. which was pretty awesome.

[Update 2015] In an effort to reduce the number of holdover pages on the blog, I am slowly (very slowly) integrating these albums into the appropriate historical posts on the blog itself. As such, photos from this trip are now below.

Ok, fine. Sky Mall catalog it is.

Nothing quite like the George Bush airport in Houston. Seriously. Nothing.

One of the less typical blogs that I read with regularity is Arthur Frommer Online. Frommer, who has been writing about travel for 50 or so years, has some really good insights into the travel industry. While he does, of course, often post about travel deals and whatnot, much of the time his writing takes on a more…political…bent. He writes about how to travel cost effectively even in the era of the declining dollar. Whether you should or shouldn’t travel to various unstable parts of the world, and lately, he’s been on a tear about Amtrak.

The latest: The moment may have arrived: We may at last be on the brink of empowering Amtrak to offer a sensible method of alternative travel in the U.S.

I’ve never quite understood why we have such crappy rail service in the US, compared to Europe. Over there, I could bicycle across France secure in the knowledge that if I got tired, there was a nearby train to take me and my bike to the next town. And it was completely sensible and both time and cost effective to travel by high-speed rail from Brig, Switzerland to Paris, France. A distance that would have pretty much required flying in this country. As someone who regularly used amtrak to go between philly and nyc when I was in school, I’m very excited to see some real movement to encourage train use in this country. It’s too bad that it took getting completely screwed by the oil industry to get there.

Yesterday, I had to go visit a client at their offices in pennsylvania. That part was fine (in fact, it was nice to see a bunch of folks I hadn’t seen in a while). The “fun” part was the drive there and back.

After getting to the rental car place at the very reasonable hour of 6:45 in the morning (!) and getting my car, I discover that it doesn’t have the GPS I requested. So then I had to wait for them to find me another car that did have GPS and swap them out for me. Then it took me over 45 minutes to get to the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel (according to my GPS, I had traveled a total of 5 miles). This was only really annoying because it meant that the poor associate who had flown in from california would be sitting waiting for me in the hotel lobby in allentown. But other than that, the drive was generally OK.

The way back however…about an hour into my trip back, the skies opened up and the most horrendous torrential downpour, complete with giant lightning strikes that looked like they were going to hit my car, started. Needless to say, it took me 3 hours to do the 90 mile drive.

And then, after I finally returned the rental car and got myself home and dried off?

I realized that I had left my cellphone sitting in the car.

Going back out in the rain might have been the most fun part of the day. Luckily, the Hertz manager had found it and put it in the safe until I came back. He was very funny – pointed out that he was going to try to call me to let me know, but then realized that he had my phone, so he just had to hope I’d realize it and come back.

My brother started making fun of me the other day because I still hadn’t finished organizing my photos from our trip through southern India. Well, now he can stop making jokes (when he started telling me that 4 months was waaay too long to sit on these, I did have to point out that we were only halfway through the trip two months ago).

There were so many of them that I didn’t have the energy to caption each one, so I broke them up by day.

[Update 2015] In an effort to reduce the number of holdover pages on the blog, I am slowly (very slowly) integrating albums into the appropriate historical posts on the blog itself. Photos from this trip are now below.

Days 1 and 2: Covelong, Kanchipuram and Mammallapuram

Day 3: Madurai

Day 4: Periyar

Days 5 and 6: Kumarakom and the Kerala backwaters

Day 7: Cochin

Day8: Mumbai

Back from my around the world trip.  Real blogging to commence once I download and weed through the 1000+ photos that I took while away, and wade through the 15,000+ new headlines in my RSS reader.  Looks like I won’t be getting up from the computer any time soon.

(oh, and while I only actually went to two countries – India and Singapore, I say "around the world" because, apparently, the best route to fly to and from Singapore involves continually flying east – direct flights to Singapore fly over Europe and Asia, while direct flights home fly over Alaska). 

…well, sort of.

I’m trying out this new thing, which involves shipping my luggage to my destination prior to my trip.  I had read about it in a few places, and decided to give it a whirl this time around.  Not for the first part of my trip, mind you, but for the second part, which involves attending a 3-day long wedding.  Somehow, it seemed really illogical to drag an entire bag filled with fancy dresses and shiny shoes around southern India for a week and a half.  So I’m trying this out by shipping a bag full of that sort of thing (and hair products, and cosmetics, and all of the stuff that is entirely unnecessary for the part of the trip that involves sharing a hotel room with my brother for 9 days) directly to Singapore, where it should arrive several days before me.

Hopefully, everything will be fine.  Otherwise the bride will just have to contend with my wearing shorts and flip flops to her elaborately planned 3-day long traditional hindu wedding.  I’m sure she’ll understand. 

At six am this morning, I was standing in my building lobby waiting for a car to take me to Pennsylvania.  I had to give a presentation to some clients.  All good, except there isn’t an espresso to be found anywhere in the Lehigh Valley, and the bagels are like kaiser rolls with holes in the middle.  It probably wasn’t helped by the fact that, yesterday morning, I woke up at the lovely hour of four in the morning, for no damn reason whatsoever. 

The plus side?  I billed over 11 hours today, and still got home by six pm.  And, I get to sleep in tomorrow morning thanks to the long overdue physical I have an appointment for at 11am (I wanted to make sure I’m up on all the necessary vaccinations and anti-malarials before I went jetting off to the asian subcontinent in two months).

Which reminds me that I have to work on getting that darn visa…