22
May
2009
Atlanta – Parting Shots
The absence of late equals getting settled in for the moment back home while I await the sale (fingers crossed) of my town house. Pretty much everything is in storage or sorted out. So, I finally had some time to edit the last few photos from my Peachtree walk.
The excitement of a big city for a lot of people is that there’s always something new. As I wandered up Peachtree, I was struck by how many new buildings there were. So many new office and condo towers that weren’t there a decade ago. This one, of which I know little, is The Mansion on Peachtree. If nothing else, it cuts a nice figure against a moody sky. This is viewed from the Lenox Marta station.
Urbania - The Mansion on Peacthree
It’s fitting my last shot was one of the first buildings I remember really noticing and liking when I lived near Buckhead lo those many years ago. It was almost brand new then and had few new buildings surrounding it and certainly nothing like the Mansion only blocks away. I used to think maybe the roof was truly hinged in some way but learned soon it was fixed permanently, but I still like the look. It gives the building a sense of motion or energy or something I can’t quantify but appreciate.
The Pinnacle on Peachtree
As pretty much always, these are just a few photos I’ve added to the Urban World gallery -be sure to check there for more if you’re interested.
That’s about it for news for the moment. I hope to get out and take some more rural shots soon. Maybe some light local traffic, but mainly I’m just hoping to get my house off the market so I can head overseas for a bit. But the break has been nice. It’s amazing that it feels like only a few days have passed not weeks but it’s a great pause in life to reflect, etc.
12
Oct
2008
I Can Laugh Now
Picture this, I had to go to Chicago on a business trip this past week. There wasn’t a lot of advance notice, but it was not the first time, so I sailed through the trip arrangements and off I went.
Arrived Monday afternoon for an all day meeting Tuesday. Tuesday flew by, quite busy, and I hopped back in the rental car and drove to O’hare. Checked in the car and got to the terminal, rushed to the Delta Kiosk, and swiped my credit card. I half paid attention when it said it had problems finding the reservation and it asked for the city destination for help finding it. Punched in “ATL” and waited. Again, it said it couldn’t find it and asked if I had the flight number. I pulled out my itinerary and then punched in the flight number.
Seconds later, it popped up with, not a valid flight number for O’Hare. Hrmm… Must have typoed it. I looked back at the itinerary and suddenly the words “MIDWAY” jumped out at me… I have never had such a sick sinking feeling in my life. I was at the wrong airport! At slightly over two hours, on a rainy Tuesday, and I was at the wrong airport. I rushed to the ticket counter to see if there was anyway to get on a flight out of O’Hare. Nope, all full the rest of the night. They thought I had a shot at getting to Midway and sent me to a shuttle service that would supposedly get me to Midway in 20 minutes.
The shuttle driver was not so optimistic. Rain and bad traffic, he figured it would be well over two hours… He shared the news with me that I apparently could have taken a couple of connecting trains after we had been on the bus half an hour… hmm… not so helpful there bud.
Sure enough, we arrived at the airport within minutes of my 7pm flight leaving the gate. And, of course, it was the last flight of the night. I got on a 6am flight instead and went to find a hotel room. I ended up at a hotel a few minutes from the airport and did some work over a McD’s meal while half listening to the presidential debates.
Not a lot of sleep was had before I had to get up to go to the airport again. I got home late morning.
I can laugh a bit about it now so I feel more open to sharing this insane story. Still have some angst about our travel booking system, though. I never search on cities. I searched on the airport code, ORD, so now I know that our daft system will still deliver you flight options at other airports. Good to know… I’ve learned to look a little closer at the results our booking system delivers.
12
Sep
2008
Looking Back
I have no idea where to begin. I really haven’t properly logged my experience in Cornwall, and I don’t have my notes with me and I’m bushed. For the moment, we’ll leave it at incredible. Newquay was a gorgeous piece of earth, as was all of Cornwall. It was the quintessential English experience, even if the Cornish don’t consider themselves English. Rolling hills, tiny country lanes, dotted with centuries old homes, and one charming hamlet after the next. We spent our last night in the city of Bath. Bath is an incredibly walkable little city. Very upscale, which I wasn’t expecting having read nothing about the city that owes its name to the ancient springs the Romans built their spa on. It was apparently a special place even to the ancient Britons before the Romans came. And it’s another place I could definitely wander again. I did the highlights, Bath Abbey and the ruins of the Roman baths and wandered a lot of the Georgian town, but we rolled in about 5pm and left at noon the next day, that’s definitely a taste.
More than I expected to share, but it’s a bit of a catch up to yesterday, when we slipped back into London. Amazingly little traffic, but made up for by a brief scare when the bus driver pulled off because the steering went out briefly. It mysteriously started working again and they were told to bring it on in and it would be checked today. I think this was a portent of things to come for me.
A few of us walked to Victoria train station together and said our final farewells. They announced something about the Eurostar service being canceled. I didn’t think much of it because I was leaving from St. Pancras, not Victoria Station. I got to Kings Cross / St. Pancras and arriving there heard more about the Eurostar service being down but little details. I didn’t stick around, I wanted to put my bag down first. I walked to my hotel for the night and noticed that every hotel I passed, including mine, had signs that there were no vacancies. I got in and checked in and the desk clerk said that all the rooms were booked because no one was leaving St Pancras for Europe. He said I was lucky I had a room as there were none to be found remotely near Kings Cross that night. He didn’t know much more other than there was a fire at 2pm local time.
I went upstairs and watched the news. The Channel Tunnel takes cars and trucks as well as passenger rail, but everything that goes through the tunnel is on a train. A commercial train had a truck it was carrying catch fire and soon out of control. No one killed, and no passenger trains in the tunnel at the time. So some good news. This happened before in 1996 and the tunnel was partially closed for 6 mos for repairs. I didn’t have a good feeling as they said the fire was under control but still burning and this was like 7pm…
I went over to the station and managed to find someone to talk to. I was told to watch the news and if they didn’t cancel service the next day to return at 4:30am (when they opened) to be assured of confirming my seat and not losing it. I had dinner and wandered awhile before returning to the hotel. The news that night was still the same, service canceled, fire still burning… I went to sleep and set an alarm. When I got up in the morning, the fire was still going. No point walking to the station. I still need to get my refund since I obviously can’t reschedule this trip in the next 60 days.
I went back to sleep and slept as late as I could before leaving. I came to the Ace Hotel, the hostel I was staying in here after getting back from Paris. I was dead lucky, as they had one bed available tomorrow night. I have to move tomorrow morning and again the next morning to the bed I originally booked. Not fun but at least I have a place to sleep.
All in all, I put this in the lucky category. Lucky no one was hurt, lucky I wasn’t in Paris already when this happened and having to try to arrange another way back to the US next week. They may start limited service to Paris this weekend but gosh knows if I could get on that if I was over there. I am lucky I wasn’t one of the people who had important things to get to Europe for this weekend (marriage, school, and a pile of others listed in the paper). Thousands of peoples lives disrupted, I can handle a vacation going a bit awry. On that same note, this morning when I watched the news, I soon found the tunnel fire was the second headline. A major travel agency went bankrupt this morning. Around 50k people are apparently stranded away from home with no immediate way to get back. The government is sorting that one out. There are also tons more who have yet to leave on vacations that no longer exist.
A very strange end of the week to say the least, but I’m here and I’ll make the best of it. Today was just a long wander with the camera. A nice sunny day with some excellent cloudy but magnificent skies. No idea what I’m going to do tomorrow. My feet are telling me to chill. We’ll see if I listen to them (or what they say in the morning). I didn’t have plans for what to do with myself when I got back to London to begin with, now I have more time than originally! Oh well, it’s a city with an impressive number of options.
One day I’ll look back on all this with a smile. I’m already able to see the silver lining, that’s a start.
30
Dec
2007
Coming Undone
Excuse me if I’ve written this before. It’s entirely possible. Because every time I travel, there’s this surreal feeling of my life unraveling. Maybe it’s just symbolic, but from the point I bundle up whatever possessions are going with me and lock the front door, it starts. I close the door on all but approx 40 lbs of worldly goods and drive away. A few miles later, I’m parking my car at the MARTA station and leaving behind another of our most expensive possessions. Now you can throw in a train ride and a few plane rides, and it just feels like I’ve come unraveled and everything is surreal.
Friday’s coming undone found me running behind as usual. I don’t remember the last time I left on a trip and was packed well in advance. I know in 2004, the first time I went to London, I was practically packed a week before I left. Now, I’m tossing things in the back on the way out the door. This is almost too literal for words. I guess I’ve become sloppy about it, thus the unraveling.
I got to the airport fine, but stood in line for nearly an hour just to check my bags and get my boarding pass. If anyone ever tries to give you paper tickets, especially for international travel, fight tooth and nail not to take them. Thus was the results of booking my trip through American Express (to use up all my points but save $$ on airfare). Luckily, security was less than 5 minutes. No waiting, so I made up my time there. Ironically, the bad weather on Friday delayed the flight an hour as well. I knew that was going to happen. I looked outside at the dreary gray mess I was leaving and just knew that there would be delays.
The Delta flight over to Paris was better than the last time I flew them over the Atlantic. Roomy seats and I watched two movies. I did my best to sleep along the way but got precious little.
Arriving in Paris, I managed to muddle my way through security and go wait on the next plane. It’s so weird. I’ve been to France now, but I wouldn’t really add it to my list. It’s not like the airport of any city counts for much. But the Paris airport was predictably sytlish. It felt like a mall with airport gates scattered throughout. I slept for maybe a half hour at my gate. Woke up to the sound of people getting up and saw that the gate changed. Trudged across the entire terminal and couldn’t sleep again. Boarding was haphazard. No announcements, no calls for rows or zones, just a note on the board for when boarding began and that they would not announce anything to cut down on the multiple languages required. For the haphazardness, I couldn’t tell. It was just the same as every other plane I’ve boarded, people crowding the aisles, hunting for space in the overhead bins, etc.
Most of this flight was in the dark. The only daylight I saw after leaving Atlanta was sitting in the Paris airport. Nearing 24 hours being awake, I slept almost all the way (4 hours) between Paris and Cairo. I missd the meal, all the drink service, everything, just zonked out. Believe me, it was exhaustion, not the seats, among the most uncomfortable I’ve ever sat in. So much for the reputation of Air France…
So, this is the state I arrived in Cairo last night, nearing 24 hours of travel and over 24 hours awake. And I enter the passport control area in a muddle. Luckily I paid extra for airport transfer and the Intrepid rep met me and helped me get my Visa, pass through passport control, and get the heck out of there. He popped me in a hired car to deliver me to the Victoria Hotel.
Here’s where things got interesting… or started to… wow… the driving here… well, it’s not unlike Naples, Italy. That’s to say that Cairo joins the list of places where Mark will never drive. Let’s say they are creative about the number of lanes of traffic. The lines are really just vague suggestions more than anything else. And the number of lanes can go up and down suddenly. It’s really an art to watch… safely from the seat with my seat belt on and holding on to the “oh golly gosh darn EEEK” handle. Mind you, the driver was not buckled… c’est la vie… One other observation about Cairo drivers, they are far more aware of the dimensions of their vehicles than their American counterparts. I’ve watched us, we never seem to think we have room and almost always have over-estimated the size of our cars. The folks here, they KNOW they have room, and I’m looking out the window at the 2 inches that proved them right. I’ll have more observations on the driving in a moment, but we’ll stick to chronological order for the moment.
Arriving finally at the Victoria Hotel (nearly an hour of that driving later!), I noticed something very common here, metal detectors when you enter the hotel… wow… okay…. Mind you they seem to just be a formality because I beeped and no one stopped me. And I’ve since seen that over and over. And then I got to the reception desk and was informed I’d been moved to another hotel… oy vey… I got very vague directions to it that I couldn’t follow on the amount of sleep I was working on. I also couldn’t seem to find out if this was just a one night thing or what. My first night here was my own thing, not part of the tour, so was I coming back. They had no idea… Great… they did send a bell hop to show me the way. We got to the corner, and again, I had no clue where he was telling me to go. A taxi driver overheard and offered to drive me. I wasn’t too thrilled but the guy was incredibly nice and said it was so close “no charge.” He drove me the few blocks (no way I’d have found it in the dark, though, as tired as I was) and I tipped him what was probably more than the fare would have been for his kindness. I may have gone too far, he was very happy. Oh well…
I checked int Capsis (I think that’s the name) and they couldn’t tell me anymore about my permanence at the hotel, and I was too tired to care. I went up to my room, text messaged my parents I was alive and collapsed. Even the rhytmic honking in the streets 6 stories below (it was that loud) couldn’t keep me awake.
Now, the morning prayers that started around 5:30am, THAT woke me up… wow… piercing is the word! It gets your attention. And I could see a minaret nearby out my window – the only nice part of the view. I was awake but watched some channel that was showing an Italian translation of an American movie…
Finally, got down for the included breakfast, which was surprisingly filling for little more than hard boiled eggs and bread. I asked the front desk again if they had any idea if I was staying or moving to Victoria or what. No idea… Okay, I asked, could I leave without worrying when I came back, i.e. check out is at noon, what if I am changing? They said if my bag was packed, they’d put it in storage if I was to move. I could come back whenever.
And so, I wandered out into the streets of Cairo, with no real aim of what to do. I figure I’ve got 14 days coming of touring. I thought maybe I could just take in some of the city not per se touristy. I had contemplated an early morning sunrise at the pyramids, but I had missed that by hours and tomorrow morning is the pyramids anyway. So, I walked…
And walked…
And walked…
Maybe I skipped the part about running? Fast?
As nuts as Italy was, I finally got comfortable crossing streets there. There was a controlled chaos in that the drivers seeing you crossing would slow to allow time. Not here. No slowing down at all. I don’t know what they’d do if you couldn’t make it. But it really is that bad. Every major street crossing is an exercise in pray and run. I was heading more or less towards the Nile, so I figured, why not see the Nile. Not that I won’t be floating up it in a few days, but still something to do. Wow, hair raising street crossing after hair raising street crossing to get to the Nile near the 6th October Bridge. In fact, the last 3 or 4 lanes of traffic (hard to gauge how many), I kept standing at a cross walk painted on the street thinking surely they’d stop traffic at some point to let all those other lanes trying to cross up ahead… Until a friendly officer walked up, hooked onto my shoulder and walked me across… This was very nice of him, but also a tad scary. This is the approved way of crossing – frogger style!
I didn’t stay long. Took a few pictures, enjoyed the grimey ambiance and moved on. I started heading back towards where I was staying. I was a touch faster at all those crossings this time, but still it’s not a particularly pedestrian friendly place despite all those pedestrians. And there’s nowhere in this area to just sit and enjoy. So, I did a turn around the El Fath mosque (just the outside) to see where my wake up call came from and headed back to the hotel. Went up and read the guide book trying to think up what to do next. Was there maybe 15 minutes when the phone rang, my Intrepid tour guide! Yeeesss!!
He’d come to collect his wayward tourists. There turned out to be 6 of us that had been sent over and he was moving us back to the Victoria. This place is definitely a step above. Still not the ritz for anyone with US expectations, but I open the window and I hear birds!
We meet up later tonight to do the group orientation and have dinner. So, I figured the internet cafe in the garden meant it was time to catch up. I’m not sure when the next opportunity will be either.
Tomorrow morning, according to the itinerary is early morning at the Pyramids followed by the Egyptian Museum (walked by it this morning). Not sure where that gets us into the day, but in the evening we board a sleeper train bound for Aswan.
29
Nov
2007
