Category Archives: Travel

I got a mailer from the “Hilton New York Family” offering special [sic] rates for a variety of Hilton properties in New York City. They offered a special set of Broadway packages, including theater tickets to Wicked, Jersey Boys, or other shows, with a wide range of dates. Unfortunately, the URL they list on the flyer is wrong (www.hiltonfamilynew-york.com/broadway): it comes up blank. Remove the “/broadway” and you’ll find that the URL they give points to a domain squatter. Try http://www.hiltonfamilynewyork.com and you’ll get the right page (or you could just go here).

Funny stuff: a long FlyerTalk thread on jokes to play on airline employees.

My friend Ken is an anesthesiologist (and a professional photographer, but I digress.) Last night, we were talking, and I mentioned that I was heading to Boston for a quick trip. He said he was a little envious of my travel schedule, and I told him that there wasn’t really anything to be envious of. Here’s the proof in the form of my day’s schedule:

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When I found out that I needed to go visit a customer in Bradford, Pennsylvania, Arlene and I decided that it would be fun to take the kids and go to Niagara Falls and to Palmyra. Bradford wasn’t very exciting, but I got my work done, and that’s the important part. Anyway, we left Bradford on Tuesday and drove the short distance (~110 miles) to Niagara Falls; we crossed the Peace Bridge, cleared Canadian customs, and made our way to the Embassy Suites Niagara Falls-Fallsview.

I’d used some (well, actually a lot) of my accumulated Hilton points to reserve a room, but the hotel doesn’t allow you to reserve falls-view rooms as award stays. The reservations clerk offered to let me reserve a falls-view room for CDN$100/night, but I decided to take my chances.

At check-in, I politely asked the clerk whether any upgraded rooms were available; she hunted for a couple of minutes and produced the key to room 1012, which had just a smidgen of a view of the falls. Not much, but still nicer than I expected; the room also had a great bathroom with a large Jacuzzi and a separate shower. Unfortunately, it also smelled funny, but we figured the smell would dissipate overnight, so we took the incline railway down to the falls area, where we walked along taking pictures and seeing the sites. (Bonus video: Tom and Matt chasing seagulls.)

When we returned to the room, we figured out what the smell was: a mix of deodorant and cigarette smoke. After spending the night there, Tom’s asthma had flared up, so the next morning I asked the hotel to move us to another room. The clerk forewarned me that she’d have to move us back to a city-view room, but that was fine by us since that’s what we’d paid for.

(A couple of quick hotel notes: parking is CDN$20/night. It might be available at the casino next door for less. The lobby and elevators were always crowded, and waits for the elevators sometimes stretched to 5 minutes. If you’re having the hotel breakfast, get there before 9am to avoid long lines, though they usually move fairly quickly. There’s a coin laundry on the 10th floor that’s well worth the CDN$2/wash.)

We headed off to Marineland, where Arlene and I had had such a good time on our prior visit. We visited both of the shows: one with some sea lions and a better, longer one with dolphins. In the second show, David was picked as an audience volunteer; he got to “visit” one of the dolphins (see the video). Marineland also has buffalo, which we visited for Matt’s sake. His new #2 favorite animal is the beluga, but we all thoroughly enjoyed everything we saw.

In the meantime, I tried calling Tom’s doctor to get a prescription for his Xopenex. Guess what? Canadian pharmacies (at least the ones I called) won’t accept prescriptions from US doctors. I’d always thought that was the big deal about buying drugs from Canada; obviously I missed something. Anyway, after a quick but late lunch, we walked across the street to Cirque Niagara, which I already reviewed.

After the circus, we went back to the hotel to get our new room assignment. We picked up the keys to 3318, went up to our floor, and saw that the room (at the end of the hall) had a city-view window in the sitting room. However, when we opened the connecting door to the bedroom, we were treated to an eye-popping view of Horseshoe Falls (and the Konica Minolta tower, right next door). I guess it was the hotel’s way of saying “sorry we kept your son from breathing”, but it was awfully nice nonetheless.

We went down and had dinner at the Keg, one of the on-property restaurants. They had a gluten-free menu; the food was excellent and the service was quick. However, they keep that place cold, so take a sweater. (I should also note that the hotel’s breakfast buffet is quite good, with plenty of gluten-free stuff, and getting a free breakfast for our heavy-eatin’ boys was a definite plus).

Thursday we loaded up the car and drove to Palmyra, about 120 miles from Niagara Falls. We took a leisurely tour of the Hill Cumorah (where, sadly, there was a groundskeeping crew at the Moroni monument, making it a little less spiritual than I was hoping for), Grandin’s printing shop (where the boys all fell in love with the sister missionary, Sister Mulehstein, who led our tour), and the Sacred Grove. Arlene and I really enjoyed the Grove; I’m not sure how much the boys got out of

it, but they seemed to enjoy the overall experience. We stopped in Batavia to buy a new cooler, then went back to the hotel, dropped off the van, and went to the Rainforest Cafe for dinner. Mistake! It was expensive, the food was mediocre, and they didn’t have any gluten-free food (save Arlene’s salad).

Friday we went on the Maid of the Mist and over to Clifton Hill, where we let each boy pick out a stop. Matt chose the Spiderman ride at the Marvel joint. Tom chose the Guinness museum, and David chose the SkyWheel. I took Matt to the funhouse as a bonus. (Arlene wisely chose a different attraction; I think she got the best deal).

We tried to watch the fireworks Friday night from our hotel room; normally they’re launched over the Horseshoe, but when winds change they sometimes launch between the two falls, and that’s what happened. We couldn’t see anything, but we were all exhausted, so it wasn’t a big deal.

Saturday we drove home through almost incessant rain. We took the northern route through Hamilton, London, and Windsor; the scenery doesn’t vary much, but there was little westbound traffic, so we made good time.

Short review: it was fantastic! They have a Concorde (see below), a fully restored SR-71 with a drone and a start cart, some really beautifully restored WW II warbirds (including both Corsair variants), and a really nifty air traffic control exhibit. I enjoyed the Barry Ross art show as much as I thought I would, and surprisingly David liked it too.

The panorama below is of the museum’s Concorde; I shot with a Nikon Coolpix S6 using its panorama assist mode. I then used a Mac program called DoubleTake to stitch the panorama together. I’m really pleased with how it turned out and will be registering DoubleTake (and taking more panoramas– sure wished I had thought to take one of the Blackbird while we were there!)

Today marks a really special event: I’m taking David on a business trip with me, something I haven’t done for several years. He’s accompanying me to Seattle, so I can meet with some folks at our Redmond office. He doesn’t know it yet, but we’ll also be stopping at the Museum of Flight— I’ve always wanted to see it, and now I have an opportunity. I’m especially excited about the Barry Ross art exhibit. Ross illustrated the “I Learned About Flying From That” column in Flying magazine for many years. If you’re not a Flying reader, you may not know that ILAFFT is a monthly reader-submitted column that talks about dangerous experiences that pilots got themselves into, so his illustrations tend to be filled with peril. Should be a good show.

Of course, David being David, he’s equally excited about flying, eating airplane snacks, staying in a hotel, and seeing my partners– we’ll have a great trip!

I thought I should jot down a few things I learned from my recent trips before I forgot them. First, South Africa really does use those whopping big power adapters. Connectors to make a standard Euro or US plug fit them are fairly easy to find, but you could save a few bucks by buying them beforehand. Don’t be like me and buy the UK plug thinking that it looks the same– the South Africa plug has three large cylindrical plugs.

Second, if you want to use a public phone at the Johannesburg airport, forget it. The only phones are at the Telkom kiosk on the upper level, and it closes well before the evening international flight bank. Take your mobile phone or use Skype (if, that is, you can get the airport wireless system to work with your laptop.)

Third, although the Amsterdam airport has lots of public phones, there are only two phones that allow calling card calls– one near gate D41, and the other near the nexus of terminals C, D, and E. You should expect these two phones to have long lines of folks waiting to use them.

Fourth, if you’re going to travel overseas, don’t depend on Verizon’s alleged world phone service. Their SIMs only work in Verizon-issued phones. Before my next trip, I’ll be making other arrangements.

Fifth, when you see people complaining about the battery life of the MacBook Pro, they’re not kidding. I averaged about 2:20 on each battery charge, which isn’t even close to enough for productive use on long flights. I’ll be much more careful about picking aircraft that have in-seat power in the future.

Sixth, don’t read books about SARS on airplanes unless you want to be unsettled during the entire trip.

Another verrrrry long day. I got up about 0630 and started packing, then got a call from Louis van Noordyk, the Microsoft speaker who was going to do the event keynote. He wanted to know if I’d mind doing a unified messaging demo during the keynote. “Sure, why not?” I said. I rushed over to the event venue and found that the phone I was going to be using was a cellphone with a headset– not exactly ideal for a demo, but certainly reflective of how Exchange UM will be used in the real world.

After the keynote, the rest of my sessions went very well, and I got lots of questions. As with the events in Lisbon and Oslo, many of the attendees had been thinking about how to deploy unified messaging, but they were surprised– and pleased– with the mobility and calendaring improvements. The max bandwidth available to the home is about 1024Kbps, and even that isn’t common, so anything that improves bandwidth efficiency or time usage is of strong interest.

After the events, we took a cab back to the hotel. This seems odd, since it’s less than a block’s walk. However, both Louis and Isabel (the event planner) strongly cautioned us against walking, since part of that block is an industrial car park that’s normally empty at night. Empty apparently means bad, thus the cab. From the hotel, we walked next door to Ocean Basket, a local seafood chain. I had a plate of grilled butterfly prawns, Nile perch (a relative of good ol’ Lake Erie perch, with a similar flavor), and calamari. It was quite good, although by that point I was so tired I would have eaten almost anything.

Then it was off to the airport. JNB is a huge airport, but it wasn’t at all crowded either time I was there– I guess midday is their busy time. It’s also a “quiet airport”: there are no flight or boarding announcements, even at the gates. This really cuts down on the background noise, as does the lack of public phones. I wanted to call Arlene to let her know I’d made it to the airport, but with no phones, I had to resort to Skype and holding my laptop up to my ear.

Once aboard, I settled in and read the local papers until takeoff, then I went to sleep– and slept until about 45 minutes from Amsterdam! I missed breakfast, dinner, movies, and who knows what else. Now I’m in Amsterdam at the overcrowded KLM lounge, trying to clean up my accumulated inbox junk and getting ready for my flight home.

Summing up: everyone I met in South Africa, from taxi drivers to hotel maids to the event attendees, was friendly and open. I got to try some new foods, including Hertzoggies, melktart, and kingklip (a really sweet, soft-fleshed fish; Glenn kept asking people “what kind of fish is kingklip?” I think he was hoping it would turn out to be catfish in disguise.) Our event was very successful, and though it was a very tiring trip I’d love to go back and see some of the famous sights (like the Kruger wildlife reserve and Cape Town).

Today (by which I really mean “the preceding 24 hours”) was a pretty interesting day. After arriving last night, I met up with Glenn in the luggage area and cleared customs. South Africa allows you to import firearms, as long as you have a permit. Unfortunately, I left mine all at home. The airport is cavernous and was almost deserted when we arrived; most of the international flights arrive early in the morning. While waiting for luggage, I’d tested my Verizon “world phone” SIM. Of course, it didn’t work. I then stopped off at the Vodacom booth to check the SIM. Nope, it didn’t work in their phone either. Sensing a pattern, I borrowed Glenn’s phone to let Arlene know I’d made it, then resolved to contact Verizon later.

We got to our hotel, the Mercure Midrand, about 40 minutes later. Unfortunately, it was dark, so we didn’t see any of the city (except billboards– which are no more exotic here than anywhere else). Midrand is a city of about 240,000 people nestled between Johannesburg and Pretoria. The hotel was about what I expected; it used to be a Best Western, so the small but comfortable room was no surprise. What did surprise me was the fact that the hotel is ringed with a 7′ fence with an electric fence on top of that. Security-conscious bunch! That’s to be expected given that the area of Midrand where the hotel is is primarily a commercial and industrial area. There are lots of folks about at night, and not all of them have good intentions. Surprisingly, some 200,000 of Midrand’s residents live in two black townships comprising 7% of the incorporated land area.

Glenn and I struggled with the lobby’s alleged wireless Internet before giving up. I wangled the desk clerk into letting me use his computer in the hotel office; with a little plug magic, I soon had my laptop open, called Verizon, and asked why my SIM wouldn’t work.To abbreviate the discussion, the answer is “it only works if you have a Verizon global phone”. Oops. Skype works fine, luckily, so I was able to call them in the first place.

I got up this morning about 0730, had a delicious hotel breakfast, and hooked up with the newly-arrived Jim McBee. Our first order of business was to get the right kind of power adapters– turns out that the “type M” style that I’d bought were the wrong kind. We had a nice walk up the street to The Boulders, a shopping center whose chief claim to fame seems to be a very large collection of boulders on the lower level. On either side of the street, there were little stalls selling fruit, candy,various kinds of counterfeit goods, and other things that we weren’t actually looking for. No one was unfriendly, but we did get some semi-hostile glares. At The Boulders, we found an electronics shop (no luck), a sort of WalMart-like discounter (no luck), and a car stereo store (bingo!) I bought some food for the kids (including some Simba potato chips and some assorted unusual candies).

The wireless Internet still wasn’t working, so I rebooted the access point– and voilà! that fixed it! For the rest of the afternoon, I worked, punctuated only by a visit from the local ward’s bishop, Mike Perry. He was an absolutely fascinating guy– he runs African Reptiles and Venom, a sort of one-stop snake superstore. Mike breeds and sells several varieties of reptiles, collects venom for use in antivenom sera, puts on corporate events and kiddie shows, and so on. We really enjoyed speaking to him, and I promised to look him up if I ever come back. In fact, I’d like to hire him; one of the team-building events he does is called “Fear Factor”. The victim, errr, contestant gets to put their head into a glass tank full of (non-venomous) snakes, then retrieve a piece of fruit from the tank using their teeth. What a way to build esprit de corps: “start acting like a team or I’ll bring Mike Perry back here again!”

For lunch, we went next door to Steers, a local fast-food chain, then it was back to the hotel for more work. We ended the day with a visit to the conference venue, which is huge! Jim has room for about 700 people in the room where he’ll be presenting; I haven’t seen my room yet, but it probably won’t be that big. More tomorrow; now I’m off to bed.

Note to self: next time you get ready to go on a big trip, make sure you have your passport before you leave home. Yes, that’s right: I woke up at about 3am this morning with the bolt-out-of-the-blue realization that a) I had forgotten my passport and b) I was approximately 980nm away from it. After puzzling over it for a while, I sent Tim a text message begging for help; he stopped by the house on his way to work and grabbed it, then met me at the Detroit airport. Fortunately, for this trip I’d booked MLU-MEM-DTW-AMS-JNB instead of my original MLU-ATL-CDG-JNB plan, or my goose would have been cooked. Now I have my passport, most of my stuff (missing one electrical adapter, which is survivable), and am headed to AMS to change planes!

SAS has got, by far, the best in-flight magazine I’ve ever seen. Scanorama is beautifully laid out, funny, and with information about actual items and people of interest to visitors in Scandanavia. (One thing I really dislike about Delta’s Sky is that they always write about random places; I’d prefer a magazine that will tell me something about the place I’m actually going).

When I got to AMS, I made a stop at the
Rijksmuseum at the airport.
This is a neat idea: an art museum embedded in the concourse of the airport.
They’re currently featuring an exhibit called "Really
Rembrandt?" featuring pictures that were once thought to be Rembrandts but
aren’t, plus one ("The
Oriental") that was first thought to be authentic, then a fake, then
authentic again. Unfortunately, my plans to take a refreshing shower in the KLM
Crown Lounge was thwarted by a combination of KLM’s unclear policy on who gets
lounge access and their ongoing inconsistency in enforcement. So, too bad. I’d
been forewarned by FlyerTalk that the KLM lounge folks jealously guarded their
showers, so it wasn’t the end of the world. After that, getting to Oslo was
easy.

I didn’t know that there was a train (the
Flytoget, or airport
express train) connecting the Oslo airport with the Sandvika area, where my
hotel was. I found that out after paying NOK 1180 for a taxi (that’s about
$165). It was a long taxi ride, but still, that’s a heck of a fare. I was
careful to take the train for my return to the airport (but more on that in a
bit). When I got to the hotel (the

Thon Hotel Oslofjord, part of a local chain) I found it to be a pleasant,
open building right near several shopping areas (including a
grocery store
where I bought some Norwegian mystery food for the boys). As is the case with
many hotels in Europe, the in-room Internet is wireless-only. This proved to be
a problem, because both the reliability and performance of their net connection
was poor, and that’s all we had access to in the meeting rooms downstairs. I had
lunch with Jim McBee, then spent the rest of the day working on some new and
improved demos. The Sandvika chapter of Rotary met in the hotel that evening,
but I was too busy with my demos to go to the meeting– now I rather wish that I
had gone.

I got up early Thursday morning for the roadshow itself. This time, I had to
present an hour-long keynote plus my regular sessions. That definitely makes the
day a bit longer. However, my new keynote demo of Exchange ActiveSync and the
mobility policies in Exchange Server 2003 SP2 and Exchange Server 2007 went
really well. I couldn’t get the provided telephone to work properly, so I had to
cut short the unified messaging demo, and I didn’t have time to even attempt the
demo of Exchange’s new Local Continuous Replication feature. Too bad; it’s a
really cool demo. I was surprised to see how many people in the audience had
Windows Mobile devices, though, so the EAS demo was definitely very well
received. After the keynote, I had to hustle to my other meeting room to present
my track sessions on Exchange mobility, unified messaging, and real-time
communications. As in Portugal, the demo of Exchange UM (and particularly
Outlook Voice Access) was a huge hit. During the day, I got a chance to pop in
on Jim and Glenn to see how their sessions were going; they both reported smooth
sailing and a fair number of audience questions. I enjoyed getting to see Glenn,
since I normally only see him at Microsoft events.

One difference I’ve noticed about European audiences is that they tend to ask
fewer questions in group settings. Overall, we had more questions in the Oslo
sessions than we did in Lisbon, but still many fewer than I’d expect from an
identical event in the US. I’m not sure why this is. However, the attendees were
friendly and engaging, and fortunately they spoke much better English than I do
Norwegian. (I’m going to try to learn a couple phrases of Afrikaans before I go
to Johannesburg.)

Speaking of Norwegian: I think I liked everything about Norway, from the
architecture to the pleasing mystery of road signs and food labels to the fact
that it was still light at midnight. The weather was decent, the people were
friendly, and I enjoyed the few glimpses I got of the city and countryside.
Unfortunately, it was such a short trip that I didn’t get to do even the minimal
sightseeing I squeezed in in Lisbon; I’d like to take another trip to the region
when I have more time to look around. (Oslo’s about the same size as Toledo, but
it’s a heck of a lot more interesting!) It’s clearly an expensive place to live,
though; there’s a hefty income tax, plus VATs on everything you buy, plus
additional taxes on some items (like cars). I got quite a lecture on how
wonderful Norway’s social support net is from my cab driver, who somewhat
ruefully admitted that his cab (a Mercedes station wagon) cost about $40,000
list but cost him about $78,000 when taxes were factored in. Wow.

My original return was supposed to be OSL-CDG-CVG-TOL, but I only had an hour
to transfer planes at CDG– and as anyone who’s been there knows, that’s not
nearly enough time. I changed my flights to go OSL-AMS-CVG-TOL, with my first
flight at 0655– early, but still doable. Then yesterday, the airport radar at
Stockholm’s airport failed, and that caused a ripple effect of delays and
cancellations– so my convenient [sic] 0655 flight was cancelled and I had to
take a flight at 0615 with a plane change in Copenhagen. No problem: I woke up
at 0350, took a taxi to the Sandvika train station, and paid NOK 96 for a ticket
on the 0424 train (which I just barely made!) A 45-minute train ride later, I
was at the airport, which was pure chaos. Fortunately, I made the flight. The
SAS Airbus 321 that I was on had a cool nose camera; they left it on in flight
so you could see landmarks passing below as we flew along. SAS also served a
delicious little deli-style breakfast box, with fresh, warm rolls, little
containers of yogurt and juice, and small pieces of meat and cheese. Highly
recommended! I ddn’t get to see much of the Copenhagen airport; however, like
the Oslo airport it was spotlessly clean, well-lit, and much more nicely
appointed than the typical comparably sized US airport. Then it was on to AMS,
which I can now navigate like a pro. I easily made my flight to Cincinnati
despite the bad advice I got from Delta agent Erika R (she made me go to the NW
transfer desk to check in, and of course NW was having none of that). Now I’m on
my way home, although I won’t actually be able to post this until I get there.
Tomorrow I’m helping out at the boys’ Scout day camp, and on Sunday I plan to do
as little as possible!

And so, off to
Oslo. It’s traditional that I forget
something on every trip. For Lisbon, it was my sunglasses. For this trip, it was
my USB headset (which I use with Skype
to make cheap international phone calls) and a camera.

My itinerary was a
little unusual this time; I went DTW-ORD-AMS-OSL on the outbound, all on
Northwest and KLM. The ORD-AMS leg was on a KLM 747-400 (in the "combi"
configuration, which carries fewer passengers and more cargo than a standard
747-400). I was seated in row 2, just under the cockpit. It’s amazing how much
more you can see from this far forward– I was so far in front of the wing that
I couldn’t see it at all from my seat. I was treated to a gorgeous view of the
late-afternoon Chicago skyline as we flew over it.

How does
KLM’s business class
stack up to Delta’s? The two are similar in many respects; the seats are about
the same size and pitch (though I found KLM’s to be slightly more comfortable).
After takeoff, the initial service on both includes a small dish of nuts. Delta
heats the dishes, which definitely makes the nuts taste better. For dinner, my
choices were tenderloin of beef with a bacon and cheese crust, a stuffed chicken
breast, or teriyaki salmon (which I passed on only because of its spinach and
shiitake filling). One touch I missed from Delta flights is the inclusion of a
soup, which DL usualy makes available as both an appetizer and entree.

The in-seat video
system is very similar to Delta’s, although KLM seemed to have more recent
choices. As a bonus, they provide noise-canceling headphones, but they use a
funny plug so you can’t use your own headphones with the IFE or their
headphones with your own equipment. Alas. I watched part of Last Holiday during
dinner and got a few good laughs.

Unfortunately. KLM
doesn’t seem to have

power ports in their seats– if I had known that I would have pressed
to get on another airline! This wasn’t a major problem, as I slept for about
four hours; if I’d planned on working through the flight, though, that would
have posed a problem. I’m definitely going to have to rethink my travel plans to
Johannesburg (which involve going ATL-AMS-JNB-AMS-MEM on KLM) if I can’t use my
laptop throughout the flight.