Christmas Trip

Here are some pics from our wee trip back to the UK over Christmas and New Year.

Debut Tour

Here are the rest of the photos from Alasdair's debut tour of the UK. As ever, click through to Picasa to see them bigger.

Let me know in the comments if you want full size versions of any for printing.

Alasdair's First Photo Shoot

We needed some pictures of Alasdair on a white background for his U.S. and U.K. passports. Nikki got it done yesterday. Alasdair is stuck with this picture for 5 years! Should be interesting getting him through immigration in 2013. Here are the ones we had to choose from.



Here's a link to view them bigger and, should you need a full size version of any for printing and sticking on fridges, let us know.

A National Disgrace

Heathrow airport has not had a great month, so let me tell you one thing that is brilliant about it: The Heathrow Express. Fast. Clean. Punctual. Jump on the train and you're in the heart of London in 15 minutes. It's great. I hope that, despite the relatively high cost, it is the first impression of Britain for many of the arrivals at Heathrow because here's what's not great: The Heathrow Hotel Hoppa.

Some folks arriving at Heathrow may decide that, after their long journey, they'd like to spend a night, or their layover, in a hotel near the airport. Others may decide that, when leaving, rather than getting to Paddington with their bags and catching the Express to the airport in the morning, they'll spend their last night in the UK in a hotel near the airport. Their first, or last, impression of the UK will then be of this ridiculously inefficient, pettily priced, shambolic embarrassment of a service.

You arrive in the UK, you perhaps haven't got any UK currency yet and you want a bit of sleep, so you head out for the bus to your hotel. Having navigated outside and found out which of the 8 different buses you're going to have to wait at least 15 minutes in the cold for*. Some oik then has the cheek to demand 4 quid to drive you the 5 minutes to your hotel, but certainly isn't going to help you loading your bags. Oik only takes UK cash. Not Euros, not dollars, certainly no minor currency. Don't worry, there's a ticket machine nearby that takes credit cards. For one ticket at a time. Languages other than English might not be available on it. Oik might wait. The bus might not fill up.

Britain can and should do better. If they're not going to let the hotels provide the free shuttles they provide in most other civilised countries ("because of traffic concerns") then at least provide the service for free. If you're going to have the flipping cheek to charge people then at least have detailed timetables, enough shuttles to meet the demand, multi-lingual signage, waiting rooms next to the bus stop and routes that aren't going to visit other terminals before you finally get out of the airport.
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* unless you've had the misfortune to turn up after 9.30 at night or before 6 in the morning, when you're probably really tired, then the wait will be much longer.

We're Home

Those of you following on Twitter probably noticed that our journeys, other than the train trip, were awful. Once we arrived at our destinations though, the trip was fantastic. Had a great time. Pictures of the good times will be downloaded and posted shortly, but first, there may be a rant or two.

Brighton Album

So off we went to Brighton. A walk along the seafront, past the strangely beautiful shell of the burnt out West Pier to the Palace Pier. A quick wander around, a poke of chips for energy and then back to the car for the short drive to Hove to visit Stuart and Sam and of course, Maddie and Jack.



Or, check out the full album.

London Album

Finally, the album from London. At this rate, the photos from Brighton and Stornoway will appear in March and July respectively. Sorry Lizzie, this may not do your homesickness much good. Most of the photos are from the London Eye, but there's a few others, including a couple of the astonishing Battle of Britain Monument.



As usual, you can go to the full album for bigger versions of the photos.

Letters

Dear Popular Science Magazine,

I like you, you're a good read, you appeal to my geeky side, but listen, you cost $5. I bought you for a 70 minute plane ride yesterday and had finished you with 15 minutes left. 55 minutes of entertainment for $5 does not seem like good value to me. I could have bought a book for $10 that would have taken me days to read. I could have rented a movie for $3 that would have lasted at least 90 minutes. It's not like I skipped a bunch of articles either, I read them all, the whole magazine, in 55 minutes. You know what happens when you're on a plane and you've got 15 minutes to kill and you've finished your magazine? You end up reading Skymall. And that, is a terrible fate to suffer.

Yours sincerely,
Ian


Dear Skymall,

I notice with interest that your business model has changed since the last time I was forced to read your magazine. You've gone from selling useless crap that no-one could possibly want, except maybe those who are brain-addled from hours of boredom, to selling mostly useless crap that no-one could possibly want, with a little bit of useful stuff mixed in. Good idea, but here's the problem with the new strategy - I'm not living on the plane. I expect to get off it at some point. Probably, before whatever I ordered from your catalog arrives, I'll have had a day or two at home to think about whether I really want to spend $44.99 on a 1GB Micro SD card. I might even have visited a shop or two. Maybe even my favourite shop in the whole world, Fry's Electronics, where they're selling 1GB Micro SD cards for $14.99.

Yours Sincerely,
Ian

P.S. If you've ever had anyone buy the Helmet Hero Camera System, please let my brother know. His solution involved an old light mount, a nut, a bolt and a washer, so I reckon, if you're flogging a 3 MP camera glued to a crash helmet for $169.99, he might be quids in.

London, Aye?

The Thames from the upstream Hungerford footbridge*, looking towards the London Eye and the Houses of Parliament.

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* Fine, the Golden Jubilee Bridge if you're a stickler for that sort of thing

Gallows Hill

Nikki and I on top of Gallows Hill, Stornoway harbour and the town itself behind us, New Year's Day, 2008.

We're Home

Those of you that check Twitter already know this, or at least know that we made it as far as immigration, but we're home. It was a good trip, despite too much booze, catching the most deadly flu since the Spanish one and being in bed at 1am on New Year's Day after 2 (two!) beers.

I have photos. They will be posted. Eventually. Hope you all had a Happy New Year. Sadly I didn't make any resolution about blogging more often, so the current pathetic rate will be maintained for a while.

All Roads Lead To...

...traffic jams. We've got 4 hours before the flight and we're already checked in. So we're fine. I'll be updating Twitter along the way, so check out the "Where's Ian?" section on the right hand side for real time progress of our journey.

See you on the other side of the pond.

Failing At Christmas

We had intentions. Good intentions. We meant to do stuff. Take a funny picture, get cards made. Maybe put up a bit of tinsel or two. Somewhere, between the Mexico trip, the December weekends full of parties and our flight to the UK tomorrow, we failed. Sorry. We have not put up a single decoration. We have not sent a single card. I feel bad about this. I'm a little scared to check the archives, but I'm pretty sure I have claimed, around this time the last two years, that you would definitely be getting a card next year...so, yeah, sorry, you're not, again. I do still hope you have a Merry Christmas though.

B.C.S. Slideshow

Here are the rest of the photos from our trip to Mexico. Enjoy.



You can also see larger versions of the pics at Picasa, here.

Baja California Sur

Nikki and I will post a slideshow once we've stopped arguing about which of the photos we're not going to post. Meanwhile, here's 5 we can agree on.

Los Paisos taqueria, in Cabo San Lucas. I think we had 2 beers and 4 tacos each and left the place stuffed and half drunk. Total bill was about 10 US dollars.

Kiwi is a restaurant practically on the beach in La Paz. Great margaritas and a lovely view of the sun going down over the harbor.

We took this boat to Espiritu Santo island, where we basically had the beach to ourselves and indulged in a bit of sea kayaking...

...which will wear you out.

Beautiful La Paz cathedral dates to 1861.

Thanksgiving

Nikki and I headed to Baja California for the weekend. Pictures and more info will follow. Thanksgiving dinner was a bunch of tacos from Los Paisos taqueria in Cabo San Lucas. The pastor pork ones were carved from a big kebab sort of thing that was right on the street. They were, without a doubt, the greatest tacos I've ever had. Best Thanksgiving dinner ever.

San Francisco in 1.3 Megapixels

Forgot the sodding camera. Argh!

Here's the Bay Bridge at night. I would like to be showing you a picture of the far more famous Golden Gate bridge here, but I didn't see it.The Moscone center displays 6 flags that may or may not represent the colours of the rainbow. I couldn't figure it out, 'cos, shouldn't there be 7?
It seemed like Oracle rebranded the whole city for their conference.
There were loads of people there. It was a good conference. Had fun. I'm tired though and still really annoyed about forgetting the camera.

Fighting For Fun

I was in Chicago earlier this week, where the World Boxing Championships are being held. On Tuesday night we went along to check out the action. It was a load of fun. This competition is the first opportunity for the world's best amateur boxers to qualify for the Beijing Olympics next year. Said Rachidi of Morrocco was rather happy about making it after beating Bosko Draskovic of Montenegro on points. There was a large and rowdy Eastern European contingent in the crowd who felt their man was robbed.

Fights are 4 two-minute rounds. In pro boxing, you win a round, usually 10-9, but in amateur boxing, every punch can count and a fight can turn quickly. Still, once a fighter gets too far behind, his only hope is to go for a knockout. Between rounds trainers often wave wet towels in the face of their fighters to cool them down, probably a more productive use of the minute of rest than offering sage advice such as "hit him" and "stop letting him hit you"

The fights are intense, only the small white part of the glove scores a point, a judge who thinks a punch landed pushes a button and if all 5 ringside judges agree the score goes up. Stephen Simmons of Scotland led for his entire fight against Milorad Gajovic of Montenegro before a spirited fightback in the last round and a couple of hard blows that didn't meet much resistance led the referee to stop the fight with 14 seconds left and award it to Gajovic. I thought Simmons could have held on as he still had a 3 point lead, but I suppose the refs should err on the side of caution. Two fights later Ihab Al Matbouli of Jordan went down hard after taking a few heavy blows in his fight and was stretchered out of the ring. He spent a night in hospital, but was back with his team the next day.

A very enjoyable evening all in all. Well worth checking out if you get the chance.

The Return

I'm back. Actually I've been back 9 days. I have just neglected to blog. There's so much to talk about too, but let's start at the start. The trip back was the usual chaos: Sitting next to selfish pigs; queuing for hours at security; waiting in vain for my luggage...it didn't bother me that much, except for the selfish pig. He was a moron. It's a simple rule: The unfortunate sap in the middle seat gets as much of the armrest as he needs. No arguments, definitely don't spread out to take the whole armrest in a posture that is clearly uncomfortable for you, and if you do, don't act all offended when I whack you, repeatedly, with my elbow in an attempt to drink my tea.

Anyway, the moron isn't the point of this post, the point is that my trip back was fun and it was fun because I decided it would be. In London there was a girl whose job it was to tell people the policy about only taking one bag through security and onto the plane. This task fell to the same girl on both my outbound and return legs, so I presume she does this every day. People would walk up with two bags, she'd say "You can only have one, and it has to fit in that space over there" and everyone would say "but they let me take two out of Houston (or Muscat or Dubai)", and she'd have to say "well, you can't take two through London". A stupid rule perhaps, but she didn't make it up and she's not responsible for it not being communicated to the airlines in Houston (or Muscat or Dubai), who should warn their passengers about it when they still have the rest of their luggage to dump stuff in and they're not tired and grumpy from a long flight. I carry one bag, a small rucksack, so I didn't have a problem here and I sailed straight through with a smile, but seeing the amount of crap this girl had to take off almost every other passenger that came through I decided that, since I was in a good mood, I would spread it around as much as I could to the people who have to deal with us traveling grumps. Next up was the metal detector / x-ray line, so I was ready, shoes off, laptop out, phone and coins in hand when I got there and I walked through without a beep, only to pulled aside for a second check. Okay. The guy starts to pat me down and runs his hands under my armpits, which are not as clean as they were 15 hours ago when I last showered. "Sorry about those", I say.
"Don't worry", he laughs, "You're my first of the day".
His colleague laughed as well and said "You're nothing compared to some we see".
Two days made slightly brighter for the price of one joke about my personal hygiene. Not bad.

The people in the duty free shop were relentlessly cheery anyway, and didn't need any help from me, so next up was the security guard at the gate. He looked like he would be a bit difficult to force a smile out of, but looking at my passport he opened with "I recognize that place of birth".
"Really?" I said, "Stornoway? From where?"
"It's always the last place on the weather reports"
"Yeah, and I bet it's always forecasting torrential rain too"
"Seems like it," he said with a chuckle, "have a good trip sir"

The cabin crew on the plane were pretty happy too, or at least pretending to be, but I still raised a laugh by proving myself to be a complete idiot by ordering a cup of tea and saying yes to milk and sugar even though I drink it black.
"I said yes to milk and sugar, didn't I?"
"Yes."
"I'm a moron, could I have a cup of black tea, no sugar. Maybe I should switch to coffee and try to wake up a bit?"

A woman traveling on her own with a toddler, a big bag and a pushchair tested my limits by opting to get on the escalator to baggage claim behind me instead of using the lifts three feet away. The toddler was out of the loaded down chair, which the mother was having trouble controlling and the kids' bravery deserted her a little bit as she started to retreat from the moving stairs and her already descending mother. As the mother looked helpless, I grabbed the chair from the front, but before she moved to rescue her kid, she took a moment to yell "grab it from behind!" at me. Easier said than done when it's taking up almost the entire escalator, so I didn't bother. "Get behind it", she shouted again, in case I was one of them foreigns who didn't understand English unless it was delivered at high decibels. As I was already at the bottom of the escalator and was now deftly maneuvering the stupid thing out of the way and struggling mightily to maintain my good mood, I revised my decision to offer a piece of my mind and instead smiled and said "don't worry, I'm stronger than I look". She smiled back and offered a mild apology, which I waved away.

The last test was the baggage claim office, where a rant was already in progress by the time I arrived and, I found out later, had been going on for 45 minutes. The man had travelled this airline "a lot, especially recently" and could not believe that "they" had lost his bag. Except they hadn't. Like mine, it had simply not made the short connection from Dubai to London and would follow tomorrow, or the next day. The ranting man, like me, lived in Houston and, I would hope, did not have all his clothes in the suitcase. His dirty underwear turning up in two days should not, you would think, have put him in the frame of mind where the most sensible thing to do was shout at a woman who had not and never would tag, handle or even see his luggage, but whose job it was to make sure he did get it at some point. As he finally gave up and stormed off, with the copy of the airlines luggage compensation policy that he had demanded, I approached the counter and asked "Is anyone who comes in here ever having a good day?" This raised my last laugh of the trip from one of the poor sods who have to put up with thousands of grumpy people being herded through their workplace every day.

I have decided that, though I may not always manage to maintain it, traveling with a cheery disposition is going to be my default approach from now on. I recommend you try it.

Same Crap, Different City