Category Archives: Travel

end of the road

April 11, 2019 8:29 PM , Leave a Comment ,

(Adapted and expanded from a Facebook post from May 2018)

I don’t quite remember when I first began doing these “end of the trip” personal summaries.  Certainly as far back as the turn of the century when I was coming back home from Baltimore though I might have done it prior to that. I just remember that particular time sitting in a mostly empty Baltimore airport terminal scribbling some random thoughts about the trip into a notebook. Since that time I have done summaries for most personal vacations and some work trips.

I’m standing in front of my hotel in east London at 4 AM waiting for my Lyft to arrive. On the last day in the UK I finally get to see just a wisp of one of those famous London fogs that everyone goes on about.  Not impressed. I do however suddenly have a craving for a cigarette.  Maybe it’s the urban setting that’s doing it but the craving passes by fairly quickly.

I decided to give myself a treat after two weeks of ‘roughing it’ and got a room at an upscale hi-rise hotel. A glass and steel spire with nice new streets, expensive roof top restaurants, and all night bars and clubs where the current crop of stylish 20somethings hang out. So this is how the other half lives.

The temptation to stay another two or three nights was strong but all vacations have to come to an end and soon the night wound down fairly quickly as I had a dawn flight out of Heathrow.

The next morning up pulls an E-class Mercedes and the driver comes out wearing a peaked cap. I didn’t ask for a fancy car and I suddenly felt rather scruffy in my travel-worn clothes and my travel backpack.

We whisk down the empty streets of London towards Paddington station. Even on empty streets it would take about an hour to get to Heathrow. The Paddington express would get me there in fifteen minutes.

The driver turns on the radio. A morning DJ is doing what morning DJs all over the US would do. Playing songs, talking to callers, getting people pumped up for the work day to come.

I could live here. I could get used to using the underground and walking everywhere and the smaller houses and running from one small store to another to get things instead of finding everything in one store.

I could probably make a go of it in any of the countries that I visited. You can learn local languages and customs fairly quickly if you want to or are forced to.

At the Airport I swap out the last of my English pounds, Euros, and Korunas for good old American dollars.

I’m thinking about how I’ll get home once I step out from Hobby airport in Houston and what the weather will be like.

My mind is shifting back out of vacation mode. I planned everything beforehand so I had little to think about during the trip. I just went to my next destination and it was there waiting for me.

While people around me went about their jobs and lives I wandered round with nothing to do. Except… joggers. Walking around London and Paris in the middle of the day I would encounter joggers and I would wonder what kind of job that they had that allowed them to take a jog in the middle of the day.

For the last two weeks my room was cleaned, my bed was made, my food was cooked, and my transport was arranged but now I’m going back to the real world.

Bills to pay, appointments to arrange and keep, checklists and schedules to make. Beds to make, meals to cook, places to drive to. A life.

My first real vacation in four years. My first real mental break since my dad died. I have come to terms with the fact that he will no longer play a part in my decision-making process.

For the past five years I’ve planned my life round his needs and now that chapter is closed. I can now put my needs in the forefront. The thought frightens me a bit.

I feel a bit like a soldier that’s just come home from a war with no clue about the future.

I had my daily routines, my schedule, the course of my life all built around him and putting him ahead of everything else so that he’d never want for anything or that his health might suffer. But that’s gone now and I have to do things for my benefit and I find that hard to do.

During the vacation I tried to remember what my ‘life plans’ were before I committed myself to take care of my parents. Those notions of what was “going to happen” seem like they belong to some other person.  My life path has gone onto a totally different course.

Twelve years ago I realized that my dad would need care and what and who I could depend upon to help. Ten years ago I bought a house to take care of both of my parents, a big Four bedroom house with front and a back lawn. Totally impractical for a childless bachelor but something that would give them the space that they had been accustomed to.  Five years ago they came to live with me.

I gave up a normal social life. The invites to events and parties trickled down to a few and then to none. No point inviting me if I always said I couldn’t go. I’ve become contented with a movie or a play on the weekends.  The parents and the job filled most of my waking hours.

The job I didn’t particularly like but it would let me work from home and stay close to them so I had to keep going. This came in particularly useful in the last year of my dad’s life when I had to rush him to the hospital more than once.

But now I’m coming home tabula rasa, with a clean slate. My dad is gone, my job is gone. I lost my job in March.

Maybe my mind couldn’t concentrate on the work anymore, or maybe I didn’t see the point in staying at a job I didn’t like with no compelling reason to stay, or maybe after 15 years of doing inside sales I just burnt out.

Sales was never a good fit for me. I’ve never been a born salesman. Somehow I kept it going because I had to. But I don’t see myself going back. Not to that company at least and probably not to the sales field.

Don’t ask me what’s to come for me. I don’t know. I’ve got savings so I’m okay for a while. I told myself that I was taking this trip to get some inspiration or some new idea of where to go and what to do. I think I knew that wasn’t true.

Truthfully I just needed time away from me.

Maybe now I can force myself to look at my situation and see something that I wasn’t seeing before. Get a clue about what to do.

Landing in Ireland and running to my next destination.

(Errata – June 2019.  One of my British correspondents rightly pointed out that Lyft does not operate in the UK. I went back through my Uber ride records and confirmed that it was Uber.  All I can say is that it was 4 in the morning and I earnestly remember that it was a Lyft but I was mistaken.)

Posted in: life in general, memories, travel, vacations, work

Making the most out of your travel experience the online way

May 26, 2015 6:40 AM , Leave a Comment ,

Travel can be a nightmare sometimes.  Whether it’s for relaxation or for business, at best travel is a chore that you have to get through in order to get on with your plans.  At worse it can be a nightmare that never seems to end.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. I get the fact that years ago when you had to rely on travel agents and paper tickets and possibly misbooked hotel rooms that things could often go awry but nowadays we have robust and well-developed and refined travel systems out there.  You really have almost no excuse not to have a good trip.

Let’s start with booking the trip.  If you just watch an hour’s worth of TV or listen to radio or read a magazine you will come across advertising for some sort of online travel agent.  I’m not saying you need to book through them but you can at the very least get online and compare prices for days and days and find those cheap tickets to almost anywhere.

You can take advantage of government security programs that let you minimize your time at security checkpoints in airports.  You can do a lot of the annoying paperwork that you had to do at the kiosks online and just drop your bags off and walk calmly to your plane with plenty of time.

Once you get to where you’re going you can arrange ground transport by taxi or über or airport shuttle.  You can tell people where to pick you up and if you’ll be late.

With hotels you can look at the actual properties where you’ll be staying and see how well you like it.  You can find online reviews or ask other people if they’ve stayed there before.

The most exciting thing about our new online life is that we can look at a location and see if there are attractions, restaurants, and other things that we can do besides what we expected.  We are no longer bound to be stuck in a hotel or an attraction.  We can now explore all the possibilities that a location can offer.

Weather of course is so obvious that it’s almost not worth mentioning but any little advantage can help.

So look at where you currently live and think about all the possibilities around you.  If you were a stranger what things would you like to know about your location?  Make up a list and then apply that to wherever it is you want to go and find out that information.

 

Posted in: activities, advice, hotels, travel, vacations, work

Does travel change you?

December 14, 2014 6:53 AM , 2 Comments ,

[Author’s note:  This is the next in a series of writing challenges first proposed to me by Leslie Farnsworth.  Leslie has organized and expanded the challenge to include a larger group of excellent blog writers.  Once per month, one member of the group will propose a topic and we will all give our own unique take on the subject.  This latest installment was proposed by Joan Johnson.  You may want to look at the other bloggers listed below to see what they came up with:]

The first trip that I can remember was the trip up from Colombia. I have moved around the Americas since I was born.  First from Chile to Ecuador and then from Ecuador to Colombia.  I remember nothing from those trips.

My father is a geologist and he was constantly being assigned new jobs in foreign places.  My family followed from one project to another.  Finally my dad was assigned to the States and we moved to the promised land of Houston and have lived there for the last 37 years and counting.

I arrived in the US on my feet.  I was about 6 at the time and we we’re landing at Miami international on a 747 back in 1977.  Back then stewardesses didn’t give a damn what you did so I unbuckled, stood up, braced myself between two seats in the isle and landed in the US along with the plane on my feet.  It was the start of a new adventure and I didn’t want to waste a second of it.

To me the US was a magical land.  The birthplace of my father, the country that sent astronauts to the moon, and where Mickey Mouse was from.  I wanted to see and do it all.  Of course there was one slight hold up.  I didn’t speak the language .

That was my first substantive change.  I had to retrain my mind in English.  I was assigned to first grade but could barely speak a word.  One day a lovely old lady, who was a teaching assistant, took me to the back of the classroom and using the flash cards meant for pre-K kids taught me the alphabet in English and how to pronounce the letters.

Now I can barely recall what it’s like to think in Spanish anymore. I can do it of course but it now takes a conscious effort.

Of course you can say that this doesn’t really qualify as “travel”.  It’s not like a vacation.  But to my seven-year old mind it was a vacation.  It wasn’t till the first couple of years had passed that I accepted it as my new living condition.

If you want a real trip type of experience I would have to say a field trip just before my senior year in college would qualify as life changing.  We were assigned to a small resort town in Colorado and did some field exercises in the rocky mountains.  A very pleasant and bucolic trip with no real bad incidents.  But what it did do for me is to give me a taste of the sorts of things that geographers did every day when they went about their research.

Before that geography was a dry scholarly pursuit.  A very sterile and lifeless exercise.  No reason to get your hands dirty but here we were getting to do research in the rawest and purest form.  All that data we were used to getting in packets or looking up in books in the library had to come from someplace and here we learned how it went.

Geography to most people means drawing maps, or looking at globes or whatnot but really it branches out into so many fields like botany, biology, soil sciences, geology, anthropology, and sociology and of course how these interact and shape each other.

Learning how the land shapes the climate which shapes the plants and then the animals and finally man who of course goes back and shapes all these too.  That’s geography.

I think that’s when I decided that this would be more than just a degree to get just any job.  It was here that I found that not only did I have the capability of doing this type of work but that I could get passionate about.  That is  when I went from being just another undergrad looking for a piece of paper to get me a job after college to being someone who cared about the thing he was studying.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in: thought, travel

planes, surfing, horseback riding, and just relaxing. Vacation 2014 part 2

December 9, 2014 6:23 AM , Leave a Comment ,

So in the last episode my travel partner and I had planned a trip together.  We had picked out Costa Rica and were on the verge of traveling.  We reasoned that the airport would not be too crowded on a Saturday and that it wouldn’t be too much of a problem to travel and we didn’t need to arrive two hours early.

I got to the airport and found the opposite.  Huge crowds waiting for us and everyone in the check in line had their own special problem.  By the time I got to the front they had closed the booking for the flight.  Luckily my travel buddy talked to one of the agents, explained the situation and got him to reopen the line for us.

But our day was just beginning.  We got on the plane and she said “Do you smell oil?”  Indeed we all did.  The hydraulic system on the plane had failed.  Everyone on board had to be shuffled off and we had to hike to another plane.  This in turn was delayed for take off.

One little thing after another seemed to delay us more and more.  We finally set our feet on the ground in San Jose about three hours late and had missed our original flight.  On top of that we had to search for our luggage.  We caught the next leg of the trip that would take us to the Nicosia peninsula.  The plane was a small prop plane.  That was a wonderful experience.

We landed in a tiny airstrip on the coast seemingly wrenched out of the surrounding jungle and found the hotel had sent a car to wait for us. A bumpy ride to say the least.  My friend didn’t look too good.  We hadn’t eaten all day and the van ride was aggravating.  But she’s a trooper and kept it together.

We arrived at night and really couldn’t see much of the property.  We got a fairly large villa with two bedrooms.  But what was needed more than anything was food.  That helped out the situation a lot.

On Sunday we got a good look round the property and planned our week.  The place has quite a range of activities.  Two things we picked out for the week were surfing and horseback riding for Monday.

Surfing.

Anyone that knows me, knows I’m not the “cowabunga, dude” or tribal arm band tattoo wearing, bro type of guy.  But surfing seemed to be one of the main activities on the coast.  After some good-natured cajoling by my partner, I decided to go for it.

My instructor, Miguel, was extremely patient with me.  He explained all the techniques gave me a lot of pointers and kept on wading out into the surf with me over and over again as I tried to get on the board and would inevitably fall off.  I finally hit my knee on an underwater rock and I decided that was it for me.  For the record I did get up on the board once…before falling off again.

But the fun wasn’t over.  We were both going horseback riding in the afternoon.  It turned out that Miguel was the guide for this too.  My partner is an excellent rider and was frequently ahead of everyone.  I on the other hand hadn’t been on a horse in thirty years.  We wound our way up hills and down valleys inside a huge ranch.  We finally ended up on the beach and rode for home.  A pleasant little ride and the best part was that I didn’t fall off.

I shouldn’t say that. No.

The best part has been relaxing with my friend.  She is just so wonderful to be with.  We’ve talked for hours and hours.  We’ve laid out on the beach reading and watched the sun set over the Pacific together.

We both needed this trip for our own personal reasons.  Life can get so overwhelming and tiresome at times.  It really warps you in a way.  But vacations serve the purpose of letting all those little knots untangle themselves naturally and allow you to find your balance once again.

The trip had a rough start but hopefully the rest of the journey will be a pleasant life affirming experience.

 

Posted in: activities, thought, travel, vacations

The reason why

October 18, 2014 6:53 AM , Leave a Comment ,

Life isn’t merely meant to be survived.  I’ve noticed that attitude among people more and more as I get older.  They just merely want to get through the day and start the next one.  Like some overly complicated maze that we as rats have to run round to get our daily cheese.

Living life this way is damaging.  I don’t care how stress free your life is or how mentally tough you are.  This will damage you over time.  We build up toxic and damaging “mental gunk” in our thought processes.  We unconsciously develop bad mental habits and corrosive attitudes.

Vacations aren’t merely luxuries or a foolish waste of time.  They serve a very real purpose.  Even if it consists merely of sitting on the couch and watching TV for an extended period of time, you need to step back from that routine that you’ve worked out for yourself and you need time to consider.

Consider if this is where you really want to be going in life.  Whether what you’re doing in your life is really the best thing to do or whether you should change your routine.  But mainly you need to unplug and relax.

Consider the mind at work or in its routine as an athlete that gets no rest.  All the time going and going and going.  Like some sort of marathon runner.  Even the most adept and determined runner will hit a wall from time to time and not be able to continue racing.  The results are not pretty.  Recovery is a long and arduous process.

Why then do Americans have such an adversarial relationship with vacations?  We have the shortest vacation time on average of all the industrialized world.  I feel that some people almost feel ashamed of taking time off.  Will the world end if you take some time off?  I can assure you that this ball of rock and metal that we live on won’t fall apart if you take some time off.

So you still need to justify it?  Vacation with a purpose then.  Make it a vacation tailored to meet your relaxing and therapeutic needs.  Take yoga classes, mud baths or massages, learn a new hobby or sport.  Visit a place that you’ve never been before or would normally never go to.

Most of all realize that you weren’t meant to live inside a cubicle or air-conditioned building.

Posted in: attitude, life in general, travel, vacations

going home

February 24, 2014 6:29 AM , 2 Comments ,

Last December the 20th anniversary of my college graduation came and went.  I was overburdened with work and family obligations so I didn’t really pay it any mind.

My dad was feeling somewhat claustrophobic these past few weeks.  He is particularly susceptible to the cold and he hadn’t dared show his face outside.  So since the weather had warmed up and I had a somewhat free weekend we decided to take a day and roam round the campus on a Saturday.

I’ve been back several times before of course but the changes always amaze me each time I go.

The first obvious change is in the trip there.  Houston Sprawl.  In all directions.  More strip malls, more subdivisions, more car lots, just more of everything.  For all intents and purposes Katy is now part of Houston proper just as Bellaire and several other smaller cities were engulfed decades ago.  You can’t tell where one starts and the other stops.  Beyond it the sprawl continues West at a furious pace.

We reach the village of Brookshire on I-10.  No doubt in a generation this too will be part of Houston.  For now it’s still somewhat isolated.  I take what for me was my little secret shortcut to College Station; FM 359.  A short two lane road connecting Brookshire to Hempstead.  After falling prey to a speed trap in Prairie View in my freshman year of college I vowed to never again feed the system and found this little road to bypass it and all the sprawl in Northwest Houston.

Of course my secret shortcut is now well-known.  A convoy of vehicles ahead and behind me.  Swarms of bikes on the road shoulders with people biking all the way out here from the city.

At one time this was just pristine prairie with the odd cow or horse to break up the monotony.  Now it’s dotted with tiny farmsteads and weekend houses for urbanites to getaway from city life.  Some build lavish homes, others live in squalid trailers and have junked cars in the front lawn.  Somewhat ruins the pristine beauty of the road for me.

I don’t even see Hempstead.  The new bypass goes round and continues on.

Another big change.  A new proposed landfill to service Houston.  The locals are fighting tooth and nail against it but it seems to be a lost cause.  Shame.

I pass Navasota in minutes and approach the outskirts of College Station.  The very first sight of it as always is the giant water tower that can be seen miles away.  Just the sight of it gladdens the heart.  Some things never change.  Some do.

College Station fits the definition of an exburb perfectly.  If you had fallen asleep in west Houston and just woken up you would swear that you’d never left the city.  What was once a two lane road running alongside the railroad tracks is now a divided 4 lane freeway with frontage roads.

Huge billboards advertise land for sale, new subdivisions starting in the 200s.  Woods, farmland, and open prairie are now subdivisions, man-made lakes and strip malls.  New big hospitals are building next to the highway.  Every imaginable chain restaurant or store can be found here.

We skirt round the campus before plunging in.  The west campus on the other side of the railroad has blossomed with new construction.  All sorts of research labs, state agencies associated with the University and class buildings now dot the landscape and there is still yet more room to grow.  The George Bush library is packed with tourists and visitors so we decide to skip it.  On the north side is the new crown jewel of the University.  The new Mays business college.  My dad asks me why I don’t go back and get my MBA from A&M.  I ask him if he has eighty thousand dollars lying around doing nothing.

We park at the visitor’s garage next to Kyle field.  The rebuild of the stadium is well underway.  I can’t believe that they’re spending 450 million on this.  But then the whole campus seems to be in a building craze.  They have to be with over 55 thousand students.  Far larger than the 40 thousand of my day.

Some of the old dorms and buildings are gone.  Sad.  But the room is needed to keep up.  The heart of the University is still intact though.  I see many of my old buildings still standing.  Old Halbouty hall, the geology building, decorated with trilobites.  The old chemistry building with weird astrological symbols along the roof line.

We take a break inside Evans Library.  Expanded and modernized.  The old microfiche and microfilm stacks are gone.  Everything is digital now.

The commons dorms where I spent my first year.  Four impersonal concrete bunkers but somehow they seem quaint now.

The corps of cadets.  Some in uniform, some not.  All distinctive due to their crew cuts.

Such a rush of memories coming at me from all sides.  I don’t know if it’s the same for alumni from other schools (although at A&M we don’t have alumni, we have former students).  I’ve seen people from other schools describe their college life in fairly plain terms.  They go to nondescript schools and take generic classes.  But I’ve yet to meet an Aggie that describes their school life in less than glowing terms.  It’s hard to explain to outsiders but it’s a feeling of being bonded to the school.  Maybe it’s the remoteness of the town (at least it used to be remote), maybe it’s the feeling that the school genuinely seems to be interested in your future.

Whatever the case may be, It’s no wonder that we call school visits, “going home”.

Posted in: school, travel

getting ready

October 6, 2013 7:59 PM , Leave a Comment ,

Some people obsess for weeks before a trip and get frazzled over every tiny detail.  Others throw stuff into a suitcase the night before and take off.

I’m somewhere in the middle.

I used to be one of those persons that just tossed whatever clothes were at hand into a suitcase (whatever suitcase) and just left the next day.  Somehow it always seemed to work out.  I was never caught short lacking something vital and I never had to buy something from some overpriced airport shop.

Lately though I have been taking more care and planning things more carefully.  In a way it’s fun.  I like thinking about my trip and what I will need to take and what I have that will work or what needs to be replaced.

I am also taking more care in my vacation and allocating my time more wisely.  I could spend half my trip traveling by car here and there and not get any relaxation done.  But this trip I am planning on plenty of just plain relaxation time.

I find that as I get older that relaxation time is harder and harder to come by so I am planning out my trip more and more so I can maximize this scarce resource known as free time.

Posted in: travel

Traveling

July 15, 2013 5:19 PM , Leave a Comment ,

Not to any specific location but the act of traveling.  Not one of my favorite things.  I mean at best it’s a chore and at worst it’s a nightmare.  I had an overnight hop into Dallas via airplane recently so I will share some observations.

Wired

Don’t know why it is but whenever I go to the airport I always buy a copy of Wired Magazine.  Even if I’m just picking someone up.  Maybe it’s because it’s what I did for my first business trip way back when.  Not even that big a fan of Wired, but I always get one.

Mobile devices

Ubiquitous is hardly the word.  Obnoxious is closer.  Everything from giant laptops, to tablets of all sizes, to smartphones, to book readers.  I saw a family of five, each with their own device.  Enjoying the free airport WiFi in Dallas.  Note to IAH (Houston intercontinental) Why don’t we have free WiFi?  All they have is some service that makes you pay after 20 minutes.

Road Warrior

I’m sitting in the rear of the plane waiting for take off and reading Wired.  A corporate road warrior comes and claims the seat in the row ahead of me.  Carrying his satchel, his laptop, his cell, his…well everything.  Taking up the center aisle and carefully stowing his stuff away, blocking the path.  A little stewardess comes from the back of the plane carrying a heavy box of juices, nearly doubled over.  She says “excuse me, sir”  He looks back at her as he carefully folds his jacket and replies “you’re excused”.  I look up from the magazine and arch an eyebrow and look him straight in the eye.  Giving him a look that obviously said “Quit being an asshole and get out of the way”.  He shuffles over and let’s everyone pass.

Security

Frankly, less obnoxious than they used to be.  i think that they’ve done it enough times now that the early mistakes and vulgar abuses just after 9/11 have for the most part faded away.  That being said I still don’t like doing the public striptease that is involved in the security process.  Call it nostalgia if you like but I still preferred the days when I could accompany friends and family practically to the door of the plane and bid them goodbye.

I’ve also learned how not make my life more complicated.  All my loose objects (coins, watch, ring) go into my satchel, My clothes are as basic as possible, I use as many trays as possible.

I try to make it as pain free as possible for me and for them and dream of the day that these checkpoints will go away.

Airport food

Never touch it unless I have a long, long layover.  Specially not going to spend 5 dollars for a bottle of water.  bring it from the outside, drink it before going through security and then hope your wait is short.

Getting home

Always get this feeling like I did in school when I was sick.  When I would come back after a cold or flu I got this feeling as if a whole bunch of interesting things happened while I was away and everyone seemed a bit different.  Nonsense of course, but there it is.  Homesickness?  maybe.  More an acknowledgement of where I would rather be.

Travel can be great or it can be a headache.  But it’s not for me.  If I had wanted to I could have made a life on the road like those countless people who fly in and out all the time.  But that just wasn’t me.  I like to keep my feet on the ground.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in: travel

Exploring spaces

June 14, 2013 7:22 AM , Leave a Comment ,

I think I would have liked being an explorer or pioneer.

I always enjoy travel.  Not necessarily for the destination but for the act itself.  When I go off on a business trip, or a vacation, or just exploring some part of the city that I’ve never been before I get this rush of excitement.

I am leaving behind all that I know.  Taking few if any supplies with me.  For the next hour, or day, or week I am “off the clock”.  All my conventional life, my schedules, my comfort zone.  It’s all back home and I don’t have any of it to lean on.

I am living wild and rough.  Relying on my wits to get me through.  Seeing new sights, hearing new things, thinking new thoughts.

Have you noticed that when you first go to some strange new place it all seems so stark, barren, even dangerous in some ways.  But once you’ve been there and return it’s not so bad the second time and in time it becomes part of your mental map of the world.  I like that feeling of opening up new spaces and bringing it all into my “known world”

Then when you return back home and you see everything you left behind is running as it was when you left.  The comfort zone is there waiting to accept you back.  But yet, you get this feeling that you’ve suddenly just grown a bit for going on this journey.  You have found something that is not back here at home and added it to yourself and you have become (maybe just a little) better than before you left.

Posted in: life in general, travel