November 2008 Archives

After our first trip to Hawaii, earlier this year, we've been kind of interested in visiting again and checking out one of the other islands. We figured it might be a while before we were able to go again but the news out of the hotel industry lately has indicated that we might not have to wait as long as we thought.

Apparently Hawaii is feeling the first effects of the financial meltdown and hotel occupancy rates are down overall in the islands. We feel compassion for the people whose livelihood is dependent on the tourist industry and believe that it would be charitable to help them out in this time of need. Especially if we can score some insanely great deal on a hotel room on the island of Maui, for instance. Because that's just the kind of big-hearted people we are.

At first I was suspicious how good the deals could be, when I considered that two airlines that used to service the Hawaiian market are no more. ATA and Aloha both went out of business this year and that would normally mean a rise in airline pricing to reflect the reduced amount of competition. However, airline pricing seems to be falling along with hotel rates and fares of $244 from LA and $452 from NY can be had. So it looks like even with fewer seats available, we can certainly find some deals if we look around.

As to hotel rates on the islands, there seems to be a plethora of opportunities for someone who likes to do a bit of checking around and research. I've noticed lots of deals like "third night free" and the like are popping up on hotel websites. We might just have to see if we can snag something. We do have another business trip out to LA this January, so we may just have to see if we can extend a little to the West. Though I suspect that waiting a little longer before making plans might be worthwhile in the long run. And the short run too.

A couple of weeks ago the Wall Street Journal had an article on a luggage shipping option that United Airlines was offering with FedEx. I thought it was kind of interesting in a 'how much money can they extract from a stone' kind of way.

Basically, the concept it this: You call UAL and they'll have FedEx pick up your luggage. Naturally you'll have to do this the day before you need the bags at your destination.  FedEx will overnight the bags and you get to pay a nice big juicy fee. For instance the fee for one bag, 50 pounds maximum, transported 1000 miles is $159 each way. The fee jumps to $179 for trips over 1000 miles.

Part Three of the Breakfast Travel Series

For a bit of a variant to the traditional Southern Breakfast, and as a means of giving a shout out to the city where most of my family lives, I did make a breakfast that conjures up fond memories of Sunday mornings in New Orleans. Now first, you have to stay out all night on Saturday, finally rolling home around dawn. This is typical N'Awlins behavior and if your neighbors complain about the loud carousing one should firmly castigate them about being so dismissive of others' cultures.

Ideally, you get someone who didn't spend all night out partying to make breakfast. This should result in fewer severed fingers and three-alarm house fires. The main item and a specialty of New Orleans is 'grillades and grits' (the first word, in the quasi-Brooklynese accent that marks a long time inhabitant of the Crescent City, should be pronounced gree-ahts). This is just the thing to sop up excess liquor sloshing around in one's tum.

At last, my opportunity to do the "I'm Right and You're Wrong Dance." It's been two years five months, seventeen days and three hours since the last time I got a chance to tango to that particular tune. In the interim, in her official capacity as the female (I was going to use the adjective 'sensible', but then realized that's just repetitive) in our relationship, Mary on the other hand, has had the opportunity to do the dance approximately eleventy hundred and six times. That, of course, does not count the times when Mary could and has used the devastatingly more powerful, "I'm Right and You're a Blithering Idiot Dance."

In any case the occasion for this happy event was the long delayed visit to the Texas de Brazil churrascaria in Orlando. For something like five or six years I have expressed a slight, nay trifling interest in trying a churrascaria, ever since I read about them in Men's Meat Eating Quarterly. The concept is simple. Sit down and eat lots and lots of meat. Expanding a little on this concept and using the handy little flier on how they arrived at the concept, the churrascaria is an outgrowth of those far ago times when men dressed up in cowboy outfits down on the pampas of South America and grilled various cuts of meat over open fires and served it to other cowboys on skewers. That's pretty much it. Simple, direct and allows you to get right to the chewing of the beef.

Well, the last of the big six legacy carriers, Delta, envious at the torrents of money flowing into their competitors' coffers, has decided to institute bag fees. Looks like $15 a bag each way. Since fuel prices are dropping precipitously one can only assume that baggage fees are needed less for offsetting higher fuel prices and more for lining the corporate bottom line with lucre.

And so it goes. I would really be interested to see if Southwest will follow suit at some point. So far they've held the line but the cash they're losing out on has to hurt just the tiniest bit.

A couple of years ago Mary and I were consumers of that most pernicious product of the airwaves, reality television. Oh, we watched it all: Survivor, Project Runway (well Mary watched that, not me...really), Top Chef, Amazing Race and so on. Nowadays, we pretty much only watch Amazing Race and Top Chef, and to large degree we check out the latter just to see what outlandish getup Padma is wearing. However, since during the last season she started dressing more like an adult than a seven year old with ADD, we may have to reconsider that stance.

In any case and getting to the point eventually, the one reality show we still watch with consistency is Amazing Race. I don't know precisely what it is that amuses us the most. The people who have a failing relationship and think the stress and frustration of a race around the world is going to make their love for each other magically shine again? The badly out of shape and overweight people that think that their superior brain power is going to allow them to magically outrun the twenty year old amateur Ironman contestants? Or my favorites, the ones who enter the contest and somehow, after thirteen seasons of broadcasts, still missed the memo that at some point you'll either have to swim or drive a car with a stick shift, since they make no effort to learn how to do either before starting the contest.

While watching the show we sometimes get ideas for things we'd like to do. For instance, several seasons ago the contestants tried out zorbing while in New Zealand. Mary loved this idea and even scheduled a trip out to a zorbing location, but we were running late and were unable to make it. Strangely enough we had enough time for me to crawl through an underground river in a stinky wetsuit but not enough for the zorbing.

So anyways, a recent episode on Amazing Race had the coolest event. The contestants had to take part in a wrestling match with Bolivian cholitas. This was magnificent for several reasons. It's 'professional' wrestling and I use the term professional loosely as indicated by the quote marks. It's unabashedly fake and hokey. And the wrestlers are woman. Tiny, little women. Who wear long traditional skirts and sneakers. It's amazingly fun. This is something that if I ever have the opportunity to go to Bolivia I desperately want to attend. Whenever the Bolivian government isn't throwing American diplomats out or whatever.

So check it out.

An update on our quest to check out the sports car section of the rent-a-car world: although the original article was all about Hertz we actually ended up going with Avis on our last trip to Orlando. Oh, and what a fun-filled frolic that was!

First, Mary did the usual exhaustive research and analysis and found what looked like a pretty good deal on a Pontiac Solstice. She sent me the link and although as I mentioned before, I don't know squat about cars, it looked pretty cool, it was a convertible and it looked like with enough lubrication we could probably squeeze ourselves inside. Sold!