Michael Waring: October 2007 Archives
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Day Six.
On day six we went to
Even now the visit seems like a dream. Mostly because there's not a whole lot there, there. It seemed like a pleasant enough small city. Nice place to raise a family or launch a Ponzi scheme. And that's pretty much all there was.
We walked along the waterfront and visited the little downtown, where in the first three blocks we saw, oh, fifteen or twenty Tim Horton's donut shops. Apparently Canadians like their donuts. Anyway, we decided to give one a try. We'd stopped a Tim Horton's some years ago in Ohio, back when they were still owned by Wendy's, and found the donuts not particularly good, but we thought it was possible they just had not transplanted well. We wanted to stalk the wily Tim Horton donut on its native turf. Sadly, even in a country which from all appearances could be a wholly owned subsidiary of Tim Horton's, Inc. the donuts we sampled didn't strike us as being anything more than average. Not bad, but once you've eaten the sinful sugar gut bombs that your average Vietnamese donut shop in Southern California turns out, its hard to go back to anything less. For the three of four hundred million Tim Horton's enthusiasts (this figure is calculated by taking the number of Tim Horton outlets observed in
At this point in the trip we're actually finding ourselves a little fatigued. Oh sure, I can hear people saying well, how hard is it? Getting up in the morning and going to a sumptuous breakfast, served by extremely personable and eager wait staff. Followed by an equally sumptuous lunch and then an even more sumptuous dinner. It looks so easy to the uninitiated! Truthfully, we've been in a different port every day so far and it's a bit tiring. We were looking forward to relaxing and getting some days to just sit around, catch up on our reading and not actually see any sights. But because we're visiting locations neither of us have ever been before, we feel compelled to get up early each morning and get off the ship, walk around, sightsee and pour some money into the local economy. Fortunately there are a couple of sea days where we don't dock at all. They are coming up after
Day Seven
Ahh, the day after day six. How we've been looking forward to it since it means 1) we've survived another day, and 2) we're in
So we took a tour. It was a nice little drive around the major sights of
fort that overlooked
We both thought
I did purchase a tie with a very nice tartan designed for
Day 4
Day four of our trip at sea started with us not at sea, but rather tied to a wharf in Boston. We'd have a second, short day in Boston before leaving early in the afternoon. So, today we spent the entire day, abbreviated as it was, making Mary's wishes come true and visiting the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum. This is the art gallery that was famous some years back, if memory serves, for a daring robbery that snagged several masterpieces. Well, maybe not all that daring, as apparently at the time the museum had neither a working alarm system nor more than two night guards. Compounding the loss was the fact that the artworks stolen were not insured under the rubric that they were "priceless," a term I'm sure didn't bother the thieves much at all.
So anyhow the Gardner museum was built to house one woman's art collection and it incorporates art and architectural details from many different periods of history. Some people collect Beanie Babies, others cow shaped cream pitchers. Mrs. Gardner seemingly decided to collect everything else. One stipulation of her bequest is that the house/museum was to be left just as she designed it so there a number of empty frames where the masterpieces were stolen on display. The drawback of the bequest is that several rooms are so dimly lit that it's almost impossible to really see the art. Mary enjoyed her visit so it was worthwhile.
After concluding our visit at the Gardner we walked back to the locale where we were supposed to catch the Trolley back into downtown. We were warned that the trolley would only pick up from our location once an hour and we mistakenly believed that would mean something like every hour on the hour, much like when we had been dropped off. The correct answer turned out to be maybe 10 minutes before or after the hour, depending on whim of the driver, or so was the conclusion we drew as we caught a glimpse of the back end of the Trolley as it drove away while we were walking up to the stop. At ten minutes to the hour.
So we decided to sample the delights of the Boston light rail system which also stopped right next to where the trolley left us, bereft. It turned out to be completely painless and only cost a couple of dollars each to deliver us back downtown. We consulted our guides and quickly settled on Legal Seafood for lunch. Mary tells me Legal Seafood is a famous local restaurant that she had heard about and that everyone raves about.
Service was a little slow and scattered perhaps because the place was jammed even at 2:00 pm. Still the meal that followed made the reasons for the restaurant patron scrum quickly apparent. I had what was undoubtedly the single best clam chowdah I have ever had. My scrod wasn't quite as successful, though that might be because it was not served in a dish swimming in butter as I remembered the dish from my youth. What it lacked in mouthwatering yummy goodness it more than made up by extending the time between visits to the doctor to get my arteries unclogged.
Mary skipped the appetizers so she could indulge in a full platter of fish and chips. She thought they were pretty good with an entirely nongreasy mouthfeel and very fresh fish. She did not seem much put out by the lack of mushy peas to put on top. Strange girl.
Back on ship for a quick rest before we leave Boston and we enjoyed a drink or three as we sailed out of the harbor.
Day 5
Another port day, this time Bar Harbor, Maine. I think that Bar Harbor exists solely for tourists and lobsters and outside of summer and fall the population probably falls by 60 or 70%. It seemed like the main drag was wall to wall souvenir stands though there were a few art galleries and specialty stores squeezed in here and there. We did the only real shopping I think we'll probably do on this trip. Trinkets and geegaws for family, like t-shirts with witty logos ("Surf Maine!") and moose shaped oven mitts. Stuff like that.
And blueberries. Lots of things with blueberries in them, or things that have been stained with blueberries, or that have blueberries pureed and then mixed with mud and made into paperweights. I put my foot down on the subject of blueberry flavored beer, which intrigued Mary quite a bit. She was not intrigued by my refusal to taste it, just by the idea of a blueberry beer.
And that pretty much was it for Bar Harbor. I liked it but there I think most of the best parts were the ones outside tourist town and we just didn't have enough time to get out and check it out. Still the scenery was really quite striking with many of the maples starting to turn a brilliant red. Unfortunately it's obvious that the foliage season is not quite up to the striking levels of years past. Many of the locals seem to blame global warming or the Canadians. I think one can assign an equal level of probability to either theory.
So Bar Harbor was quite nice but really we would have better off if we had taken one of the tours out to Acadia National Park, which we heard from several people was really quite spectacular, even in spite of Canadian climatological meddling. Ah, well it leaves us something to do next time we visit the area, once we run out of the blueberry paperweights.
As part of this blog we are going to run a semi-regular feature we call the Frugal Hedonist. Frugal Hedonism is our own personal, completely non-religious, belief system, wherein we expouse the benefits of travelling first class while saving as much cool, hard cash as possible. Mary will normally write these articles, since she is the High Priestess of cost savings especially if said cost savings result in more spa treatments.
So here's Mary's first contribution below:
As Mike and I were eating an absolutely delicious breakfast this morning onboard the Crystal Symphony cruise ship, I started mentally calculating how much money we've saved on this trip by using our American Express Platinum charge card. Yes, I realize this is a little like rejoicing that you've saved $5 an ounce on caviar, but the truth is, it all adds up. Even if you're fortunate enough to be able to travel in luxury, as we usually do, there is no point in throwing your money away unnecessarily.
In reality we're able to take so many fabulous trips mainly because we shop around and get the best possible deals on everything. We also take full advantage of travel-related rewards programs, including the American Express Membership Rewards program, which allows us to accrue points whenever we use the Platinum Card. Membership Rewards points can be used for many travel awards, but we usually find the best "bang for the points" is to trade them for international First Class air tickets.
The Platinum Card has an annual fee of $450 so it only makes financial sense to get one if you indulge in at least one high-end vacation per year. By "high-end" I mean a cruise on Princess, Holland America, Crystal, Regent, Silversea, Cunard, Windstar or Seabourn and/or a paid stay at a 4-star or 5-star hotel in a major city. If you can afford that type of travel, the Platinum Card can easily pay for itself.
Our current trip is a good example. We flew to New York City and spent one night there before embarking on an 11-night cruise. Additionally we will be staying several more nights in New York after the cruise. First I priced out rooms at top hotels in New York City by checking their web sites. I found that hotels like the St. Regis and Four Seasons were running about $800 to $1000 per night for a standard room -- too rich for my blood!
The web site for Trump International showed a rate of $595 per night for a standard ("Superior") room or $645 for a "Deluxe" room with a better view. (I keep wondering why 5-star hotels always call their cheapest rooms "Superior." Shouldn't a "Superior" room be, well, superior to something? It reminds me a little of McDonald's, where the smallest order of fries is a "Medium." In the interest of honesty, most hotels should have a category called "Dinky" or "Dumpster View.")
Anyway, I digress. New York hotels are irrationally expensive -- I priced an ordinary Sheraton at about $450 per night and a Hilton at $550 per night for our dates -- so $600ish is a pretty tolerable rate for one of the top 10 hotels in the city. I called American Express Platinum Travel Services and was able to book a Deluxe room at Trump International, with an upgrade to a Junior Suite if available at check-in, for $575 per night. Additionally, as benefits of the American Express Platinum "Fine Hotels and Resorts" (FHR) program, we would receive breakfast each morning ($50 credit) and a $100 spa credit per stay.
So on our one-night pre-cruise stay, we saved $60 on the room rate, got an upgraded room, enjoyed a lovely free breakfast in the Trump's excellent Nougatine restaurant, and I got a more or less free pedicure. Total savings so far: $210, not counting the room upgrade.
We booked our cruise through an online cruise agency that offered us a very substantial onboard credit and a discounted fare. Additionally, I paid with our Platinum Card and the cruise agency arranged for us to get the special extras included in the with Amex Platinum cruise program: $300 in onboard credit, plus a "free excursion" valued up to $250. It turns out the Amex extras were simply credited to our onboard account as $550: we more than covered our annual fee right there.
After the cruise we will stay at Trump International again for four nights, which will save us $240 on the room rate and provide $200 in free breakfasts. I'll get another $100 spa credit, which I'll use for a massage. Hopefully we'll also get a room upgrade. In any case, our second stay at Trump will bring our total savings through the Platinum Card up to $1300. Not too shabby!
Dinner turned out to be quite nice and no waiter had to lay down his life in defense of the reputation of Crystal Cruise Lines. I had a cigar to celebrate arrival on board and a fine meal and because Mary lost track of me for an hour.
Day 2
We arrived in Newport, RI, the smallest state in the Union. I believe, and a cursory check with any competent atlas would almost certainly confirm, that the county of San Diego in California is bigger than all of Rhode Island.
Newport requires that we tender in, which is basically getting on one of the lifeboats. They are really smallish ferries and take a short trip from the ship to a dock. This is done in smaller ports that don't have a wharf big enough to dock the larger ships. Actually, the Crystal Symphony is not a large ship by any means - not like the Brobdignagian ships that Carnival has taken to launching recently.
Tendering isn't usually one of our favorite things, since on most cruise lines you have descend into the bowels of the ship where they dock the tenders and wait till your group is called and then board, and then on the way back you have to wait on the docks till a tender arrives and see if there's enough room to board on this one or whether you have to wait for the next one. It always seems like a little one hour tour on land takes three or four hours once you tote up all the time waiting and stuff. On Crystal we walked out of the elevator (which had signs inside indicating what deck one departs from - something no other cruise ship we've ever been on has been able to figure out) and just sauntered right on to the first tender. On our return we found that there was a short (3 minutes - oh, the horror!) wait and while we waited, in order to stave off either heat prostation or extreme biting cold, they served us ice water and hot boullion. With Tabasco or Worchestershire sauce as you desire, milord. I find that my tolerance for this type of pampering is surprisingly high.
Enough comparisions with other less fortunate cruise lines and on to Newport. It's small, it's cute (these often go together like kittens and hot peppers - though that's a story better left untold), and one can go through town in around 5 minutes, at least by my watch. Outside this vast metropolis can be found the Mansions (always capitalized). Shortly before the turn of the last century, not the 20th but the one before it, the Larry Ellisons of the period constructed vast summer palaces to which they could escape from pre-air conditioned New York. We decided to start with The Breakers, a little summer cottage that the Vanderbilts constructed to while away the endless days of summer. According to the tour guide this meant basically the months of July and August. One estimate of the cost of the mansion in current dollars is 350 million dollars. Yes, for a place to visit for around two months a year.
The Newport Mansions were the means available at the time for showing the other filthy rich how big one's stash was. Today, the ultrawealthy buy sports teams or yachts bigger than World War II cruisers. At least the silly rich of today can sell the old yachts to the slightly less rich once they get tired of the current one and order a newer, bigger one. This wasn't the case with the summer Mansions in Newport. Not infrequently, the subsequent generations weren't quite as proficient as their ancestors at making money, though they were much more talented at spending it. After a while, they found the costs of maintaining these white elephants a little too steep. It also became more and more difficult to find a staff of domestic servants that would work for a dollar a day
, a lamentable situation. Ah, the good old days, well good if you weren't the hired help that is.Anyway, we toured this monstrosity (The Breakers) and it really did strike us as the height of conspicuous excess. Mind you, this is in light of the fact that we had just spent a night in Trump's hotel, so we should have been somewhat inoculated to gaudy and over-the-top excess by the time we arrived at The Breakers. It's an enormous place that housed the family and a staff of 50 or so when the Vanderbilts escaped from the heat, and more importantly, the smell of New York during the summer. In Soviet terms, it was a building that could house probably around 1000 workers of the Revolution, that is if we Americans had ever risen up against the capitalist oppressors.
The decor in all of the rooms, but especially a couple of rooms designed and built by a French interior designer, were pretty hideous in a manner only the late Victorian, or early Edwardian period could attain. While I found the exterior design of the house interesting, it really isn't pleasing or harmonious with its surroundings. It's just this immense pile of stone perched on a cliff overlooking the sea. There are few trees nearby to break up the lines of the building, which, of course, is the point (because everyone has to see how big and expensive it was), but still.
Anyway, after what seemed like a couple of hours wandering around this monument to vanity, we both decided that we had pretty much seen enough. Interesting as the historical period was, most of what we observed wasn't all that interesting from either an architectural or design viewpoint, and we decided to skip the other two mansions we originally thought we might check out, since it seemed like it would just be more of the same. Lunch beckoned and we thought we'd go back and see what culinary delights they had to offer us on the ship.
Interestingly, the first full day on board was a formal night so I had to get all decked out in a dinner jacket. Not a tuxedo. Mary recently gave me a book on men's fashion, not I'm sure, as any sort of indictment on my personal fashion sense, at least that's what she keeps telling me. While perusing the fashion tome I discovered that the cogscienti find the term 'Tuxedo' an affront and insist that the proper term is dinner jacket. All kinds of interesting information like this can be found in the book and I now take every opportunity to declaim my new found knowledge on the subject as often as possible. I think in a another couple of weeks Mary will find the book, take it to the back yard and burn it in order to stop me. In any case, I actually like getting dressed up in a dinner jacket because it's the closest I'll ever get to being James Bond, even in my fevered imagination. To be honest there's hardly anyone who doesn't look better in a dinner jacket. I'd propose that we bring back the habit of dressing for dinner but it'd probably look silly at McDonalds.
Dinner was excellent. There was a Captains' cocktail party before hand that had free champage or cocktails, and a prohibition on shaking hands with the officers so we don't give them nasty diseases. We thought we saw more people dancing at this one cocktail party then in all the cruises we've taken to date. Combined. People were shaking it, baby!
Wait staff in the main dining room seems to be primarily Eastern European. Mary likes them because they habitually look rather lugubrious but if you work at it, like asking about their families or goats back at home they light up and look like they're only facing gallstone surgery today rather then having to sell their goats to meet the tax bill. Well, okay, prehaps some exaggeration,but Mary does like to get them excited and animated because it's really an amazing transformation.
Day 3
Our third day at sea saw us not actually at sea but moored to a wharf in Boston.. We really didn't do too much research on what to do and decided against any tours, instead relying on our steely nerves and appetite for danger to navigate the wilds of downtown Boston. One of the three or four maps we picked up from the ship gave us directions to the Freedom Trail and we decided to give that a whirl first. And thus was our day in Boston taken care of - following the Freedom Trail and touring all the museums and sites along the way is a fairly full day.
We did the Old Statehouse, the slightly less old Statehouse, churches, graveyards, maybe an old stable thrown in there somewhere. A Ye Old Bookstore, sidewalks where American patriots or bystanders were foully murdered or accidently shot by rampaging, cruel redcoats or frightened young soldiers - all of which did happen. We really enjoyed our walks along those storied streets that I still remember so well from History lessons in school. I'm pretty sure that it's all portrayed somewhat differently in school today, but I still have a fondness for history with a lot less ambiguity.
We also had access to one of the inumerable trolley companies that traverse Boston to the delight of tourists and I'm sure the bane of Bostonian commuters. The weirdest ones are of course, the Duck tours which utilize DUKW's from WWII vintage. I have no idea where they managed to get so many of them but they are ubiquitous. DUKW's for the uninitiated are amphibious trucks developed for the Army during WWII, and why someone thought they were a particularily good idea as tourist transportation is probably a really good story.We were not so fortunate as to have large antique ampibious trucks as our mode of transportation, just busses with outer bodies that look like trolley cars. Our selection of the 'right' trolley company was based on the fact that we were using Boston Go cards that Mary had purchased before we left on the trip. These cards got us a two day pass on the trolley company of their choice, entrance to most of the museums in Boston, discounts on books at Ye Old Bookstores, discounts on meals at Ye Old Pubs, and even entrance to the Mansions in Newport the previous day. All in all, a pretty good value if you're going to spend a couple of days or more in the Boston area.
So after checking out all the colonial, historical, and touristy stuff available in downtown Boston we decided to return to the ship, not least because the next game of the National League pennant race, starring the Boston Red Sox was due to start soon and we wanted to get off the streets before the natives started hunting down the non-Sox fans.
Well, we're off for a cruise on the high seas again. Oh, joy! We decided on Crystal Cruise Lines because we're using a little bequest from my dear ol' Pa, and Crystal was his favorite cruise line. It's just our little way of using his money to do something completely frivolous. As usual we combined the cruise with a couple of other things we wanted to check off our 'Before We Die' list. I've always wanted to see the Northeast during foliage season and to visit a bunch of those Colonial like places we spent so much time memorizing in school. The cruise itself leaves from New York and ends up in Montreal, stopping along the way in large and small towns along the coast. At the end we'll take a train from Montreal back to New York, so we can see even more leaves.
We spent pretty much the entire summer at home in the mountains, chuckling a little now and then when we read the stories of the endless delays and cancelled flights, slapping each other on the back over our decision to delay any travel until the fall. Fate decided to stick it to us and we arrived at the Denver airport to find our flight had been cancelled and we were going to have to wait an additional three hours for the next available flight. At least I think that was Fate and her handmaiden Hubris who were chortling and backslapping there behind the ticket counter. Though it could also have been a couple of ticket agents, it's a little hard to tell nowdays.
We had reservations at Cafe Grey in New York City that night. Needless to say, there was no chance of making it in time.
Mary says they did serve food on board the flight, but since I was asleep from approximately five minutes after I got into my seat until it was announced that we had not fulfilled our quota for existential angst and we would have to circle over New York for another 30 minutes, it really didn't matter much to me. However, waking up pretty much stunk, because about that time they announced that there would be yet another delay while they did an air-to-air transfer because the pilot had exceeded his flying time allowed in a period of not less than a single femetosecond and not more than three sidereal years. I started remembering that movie the Out of Towners (not the remake, but the good one with Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis, where he refuses the meal on board because they'd be home soon, but instead they get hijacked to Cuba). It was kind of like that.
We had arranged for a car service to pick us up at the airport. The driver was waiting for us on arrival, as was our baggage that United Airlines had thoughtfully decided to throw on an earlier plane, so it could be picked over by gypsies and confidence men at La Guardia. Actually, in fairness I have to note that, in contrast to places like New Orleans where bags really are easy pickings for lighter fingered folk, since they never have security checking luggage tags, La Guardia did actually check our paperwork.
We got into our, er, luxurious towncar, in which most of the internal details were either missing or hanging from a single screw, or in the case of the overhead light a single wire. I thought it was an interesting choice to import a car from the backstreets of Madras to New York. As was usually the case with our New York drivers he had depth perception dialed to a precision of two or three millimeters. This is especially disconcerting to those of us who are utterly deficient in the depth perception department. (Eye tests usually end up with me completely randomly punching buttons to answer the questions.) In any case, I usually find myself in driving situations like this flinching violently away from one side of the car or the other as we skirt death seemingly by nanometers. It can be exhausting.
We stayed at Trump International at Columbus Circle, which, while not cheap, is actually one of the less expensive five-star options in New York City. The Trump has one of the smallest lobbies we've been in, made smaller by the two or three hulking plainclothes security guys stationed there. I might be mistaken about the security, it's quite possible that their actual function is elevator call button pusher. Mary says that they never pushed the call button for her, which makes my musings either utterly irrelevant or raises questions that are better left unasked, as we plan on staying there for a few days after we return from Montreal. Anyhow, I like the lobby and it's quite easy to find the front desk, unlike other New York hotels we've visited, such as The Royalton, which apparently feels that if you can't find the extremely non-obvious check-in location, you just aren't cool enough to stay there.
Our room, upgraded to a "junior suite" because we booked it through American Express Platinum Travel Services, was a bit small but adequate. It makes me wonder about the room we were upgraded from. The room was nicely furnished and even included a small stove, mini-fridge and dishwasher, because some of the units are individually owned and used as city apartments. The minibar was well stocked, though they did offer Heinken Light instead of the purer, nobler stuff. The bathrooms were all marble with Trump's trademark and slightly tacky gold fixtures. One amenity that Mary quite liked was the offer of a complimentary pot of tea to be sent up to the room upon check in. I contented myself with beer from the minibar, Light though it was.
We found out that rooms on the north side of the building, upgraded or not, can hardly be regarded as premium, as there was construction going on (on a Friday night?) in the building across the street. In between periods during which the construction workers were throwing debris and possibly Jimmy Hoffa's body down the garbage chutes, the loading dock workers below our window in the Trump decided to fill those few blessed minutes of quiet with their own infernal din, which one might have concluded consisted of upending M1 main battle tanks and dumping them off the end of the loading platform. Needless to say on our return visit we will not be staying in a north facing room.
Since we arrived so much later than planned we decided to go ahead and get room service, and that turned out to be a good decision. Trump does have a conventional room service menu with all the usual suspects like club sandwiches, hamburgers, caesar salad and the like. It also offers the menu from Jean Georges restaurant. We decided to splurge, since we were neither still circling New York, on our way to Cuba, or engulfed in flames after a fiery crash on the Lower East side. I'm not sure if it was the most expensive room service meal we've ever eaten - I suspect not. But it was definitely the best we've ever eaten.
Day 2
Today was our first day onboard the Crystal Symphony. We planned to board at 12:00 pm, but first Mary got a pedicure at what she declared a very nice spa in the basement of Trump International.
Mary feels that a good vacation starts off with a pedicure. Mine starts off with a couple of beers, maybe some wings. While Mary was getting her pediments trimmed at the Trump spa after breakfast, I wandered around the Columbus Circle neighborhood, sightseeing for the most part, though I did check out a shopping arcade in Time Warner Center with the intention of purchasing a tie or two. As usually seems to be the case, there were a dozen women's clothing emporiums and one men's - Thomas Pink. I wandered in and checked it out but without Mary to egg me on, I found I could not justify spending $100 for a tie. They were nice ties but mostly not really my taste as I'm an old fogey and Pink's ties were not for people of my age or lack of coolness. This was reinforced by the staff who resolutely decided to continue with their conversation while I browsed the store, having already consigned me to the ash heap of history.
The vehicle from the same car service that picked us up from the airport that arrived to take us to the cruise terminal was in much better shape and we were happy to put our St. Christopher medals and cans of mace away.
Embarkation on Crystal was the most painless of any we've ever experienced. We dropped off our bags and went through the usual check-in procedures and were on board in less then 10 minutes. There, our carry on bags were taken from us to be delivered to the rooms while we toured the ship and chewed upon the fatted calf. Said fatted calf and garnishes was pretty good though Mary's Cobb salad was not quite up to her exacting standards. She did not insist that the waiter commit seppuku as it was only the first meal. Dinner would be a different affair I was sure.
It's travel catalog time again, that annual ritual when I actually thumb through the catalogs packed with all kinds of techie goodness, as opposed to pitching them directly into the recycling bin. You know the stuff - UV water filters, short wave radios with travel alarm clocks, door alarms, motion sickness relief bands, white noise generators. Apparently if I have all these items I'll sleep better, avoid amoebic dysentery, and meet beautiful Russian women... oops, wrong catalog.
Anyhow, every year, especially before a big trip, I start checking out what we're missing. It is pretty rare that we see anything we feel might be really useful. Over time we've concluded that something has to be really special to justify hauling it around, especially as I'm normally the one who does the hauling.
Still there are some things that over the years we've found to be useful and sometimes, damn useful.
First, my iPod. Back in the old days, the dark years, like in the 20th century, I used to lug around a portable CD player and a manpurse full of CD's. No longer. Now I can carry thousands of songs all on one little white block the size of a pack of cards. Or I could if I knew thousands of songs. But the three I do have on the iPod get plenty of play. I probably have saved something like 2-3 pounds weight. No more scratched CD's either. The increasing prevalence of iPod docks in hotel room sound systems has also been a boon.
Laptops. Till recently I managed to avoid carrying my own laptop since only Mary needed to update the website from the road or check e-mail. I subscribed to the belief that travel should be devoted only to sampling the deep fried snack foods of the locals and consumption of mai tais. Why mai tais? I'm not sure - it just seems vacationy. Of course, in my capacity as the designated mule I do the actual laptop toting for Mary.
Now that I have this blog, we're looking at the possible need to bring laptops for each of us. I would use Mary's laptop but for some reason my large clumsy fingers are too ginormous for Mary's tiny little keyboard and I frequently manage to trigger some esoteric key combo that shuts down the laptop unexpectedly or diverts the browser onto the Victoria's Secret website, completely by accident you understand. This subject is still up in the air though we'll have a resolution long before the Round the World trip kicks off in January.
We had a rather ancient digital camera that probably comes on half the trips we take. But time has passed it by and we just upgraded to a Nikon Coolpix S200. We're not big picture takers. We usually take the camera along on trips that we're going to write about so that we have some visuals to go with the article. The upgrade was due, mostly because the original camera was pretty much a first gen digital and we wanted something with a bit more oomph, as well as a decrease in size and weight.
We only take one cell phone with us when we travel, primarily because we only have one cell phone. In my advancing dotage I've turned into a bit of a Luddite and I don't actually own a cell phone. Well, I do but it's just an emergency phone that Mary got me that I have to keep in the car. I did actually find it useful recently when I found myself in the checkout line at the grocery store without my wallet, but that's pretty much the only time in the last three years I've used a cell.
Mary, on the other hand, has a Blackberry. There's occasionally some question about whether or not she needs me when she has her Blackberry, also known as "her Precious," but so far they haven't designed one that can bring you a skim latte. The Blackberry has come in quite handy for times when we don't want to pull out the laptop and find a WiFi network so Mary can check her email. This gives her peace of mind, which of course means that I have peace of mind. We've considered changing over to an iPhone, but the lack of utility overseas has put those plans on hold till later.
One gadget that has been a lifesaver is the iGo power adapter and recharger. This all-in-one device can be used both to power our laptop and recharge any and all of the other miscellaneous devices we take traveling with us such as the iPod, cell phones, and the like. This one piece of equipment alone has probably saved us 3-4 pounds of weight since we no longer have to tote around multiple power supplies and rechargers.
My one indulgence nowadays is my Bose QuietComfort 2 noise canceling headphones. They are expensive as all get out and probably not worth it from a strict cost benefit analysis standpoint, still I loves 'em deeply. On long flights they really do reduce ambient noise to such an extent that I can enjoy my music or the in-flight entertainment in blissful peace. Mary's one indulgence is me.
Upgrades and additions to travel gadgets:
One day in the not too distant future I'll probably replace my old iPod with an iPod Nano. The old iPod has 30gb but the screen display is fairly poor (I have to continually keep adjusting the contrast) and it's a bit heavy and bulky. The newest Nanos are up to 8GB and that's just about enough for me. So, soon - maybe as a Christmas present or something.
We almost certainly will replace Mary's Blackberry with a Blackberry Curve 8310 if we don't get an iPhone. This would kill a couple of birds with one stone. Not that we really want to kill birds with stones or anything. Unless they're quail. Mmmm...quail. Anyhow the newer Blackberry comes with a 2 megapixel camera which is a nice backup for shorter trips when we don't want to carry the regular camera. The
One piece of tech that I've been waiting for that has not yet arrived, at least not in a mature enough form to be useful, is a digital book reader. Usually on trips of a week or so we end up taking a minimum of 5-6 books between us. The weight adds up and having an ebook reader would be a godsend if they ever get the tech right. I had pinned my hopes on the Sony Reader but when I went in to Borders to check it out, the unit on display was hopelessly locked up, to the point where even flipping the on/off switch failed. Apparently Amazon will be coming out with their own version of an ebook reader sometime during October. I haven't heard enough about it to form much of an opinion about it yet. One can hope that Apple might decide to try their hand on something in the digital reader line soon. I know once someone comes up with a decent product I'll be first in line with fistfuls of cash.
Mary feels that we ought to get a UV SteriPEN for killing microbes in drinking water in other countries and whenever we visit family in
For 25 some years I forged a career making nuclear powered space cruisers and particle beam anti-missile cannons. Today I'm more or less (usually more) a house husband. How did I come to this? Read on. And as to the particle beams and space cruisers, that's just a little poetic license. I did work on a few fighters, lots and lots of commercial airliners and the occasional spacecraft such as the Space Shuttle and the X-33. I'm pretty sure I would have been a pretty fair space cruiser engineer but apparently I was a few decades too early for that career path, all the Heinlein books I read as a child to the contrary.
So a few years ago we decided to change places as it were and Mary would bring home the bacon and I would fry it up, smother it in whipped cream and serve it up on the Wedgewood china. If we had any Wedgewood china. Barring that, I'd settle for paper plates to save on the clean up. So we waved goodbye to the smog engulfed environs of
So here we are in the august mountains majesty of
Truth be told, I'm doing housework in much the same way as my mother did, though there have been a few improvements. Along the way I've tried this and that labor saving idea and housekeeping tech concept, and some have worked and others have not. So I thought I'd just dole out a few of the discoveries that I've come across and see if they help anyone. Or to give some a pathetically feeble laugh.
First, a little explanation of how we split the housekeeping duties. Since we both work from home we save all that commuting time and such, and end up with more hours per week available then the average couple. We also have no children, so massive amounts of time that most people devote to child rearing are back in our hip pockets. Childlessness is one of the disadvantages to meeting and getting married a little later in life. Or an advantage, depending on one's point of view.
So we split duties as follows: Mary cleans the kitchen after meals. And that's pretty much the extent of her household duties. Well, that and bringing home the bacon. Though since she works from home she doesn't actually go out and get that bacon. It comes to her. I do all the cleaning, vacuuming, cooking, grocery and other shopping, the majority of the yard work and house maintenance and most of the research and hiring of contractors for various tasks around the house like tree removal and window cleaning. I recently proved myself competent enough to do Mary's laundry after several intensive months of studying and testing. I celebrated with the Snoopy dance. It's my thing.
The whole house husband thing has been pretty much a gas. I'm kind of amazed how much I've gotten into it. I now insistently thrust coasters at people before they place glasses on my polished end tables and actually use napkins, even for snacks. I pretreat stains instead of taking the Darwinian approach to clean laundry (if the stains were meant to come out, then they'd come out with regular laundry soap and the perm press cycle). I have a Roomba that I anthropomorphize, though it's probably not a good idea to delve too deeply into that. And I love cooking. I always did, but never really had as much time to devote to it as I would have liked. Now I do. Of course our waistlines haven't really benefited that much from this development, but at least we eat better food. So overall, yeah, I've been pretty happy with the late life career change.
So here we are. Or there we are. Depending on whether one subscribes to the wisdom of Buckaroo Banzai or not.
Oh, and there will be a test later. Take lots of notes.
