Taking a train to New York, shortly (and briefly). Then it’s London, Denver (for Defrag), London and back. Two weeks, total. Expect light blogging.
You are currently browsing the archive for the Travel category.
1) Ignore traffic rules. They are advisory and not binding, unless a cop wants to get technical.
2) Drive in the middle. You need to keep your options open. If a rare dotted line actually marks a boundary between lanes, straddle it.
3) Don’t look for street signs. They aren’t there. Only side streets have signs. And only some of those.
4) Be ready to dodge pedestrians. They don’t look and are dumb as geese, crossing anywhere they feel like it, in complete oblivity to danger.
5) Block intersections. Otherwise the cross traffic won’t stop for you.
6) Pull in front of moving traffic. There are no breaks. You have to make them for yourself.
7) Don’t signal. You might give something away.
8] Park anywhere. There aren’t enough spaces anyway.
9) Don’t expect road names to make sense. The “Mystic Valley Parkway”, for example, appears and disappears in many places all across Boston. And not just in Halloween season.
10) Expect construction delays and detours. It sometimes happens that all bridges and tunnels in Boston are closed at once, with no signage hinting toward alternatives.
Tags: Boston, driving, Mystic Valley Parkway
1) Cross any street, anywhere, any time. Your species was here first. The fast metal things just have to adapt.
2) Don’t look left or right. Stay with your purpose. You’re here to cross the road. Nothing else matters.
3) Ignore pedestrian traffic signals. The little white walking guy and the red hand are displayed at random and have no relationship to the signals for cars.
4) Follow the others. The bold and fearless pedestrians near you can show the way. Cross with them, but downstream a bit. If they misjudge, they get hit first.
5) Be preoccupied. Use your phone, study the pavement, lose yourself in thought. You have a life. Watching traffic isn’t part of it.
The map above is a .jpg I put together from this large .pdf at a link off the San Diego County Emergency page. It’s from 6pm today, Pacific time. I like this one because it gets down nearly to the street level, and answers specific questions in the minds of millions of people who either live there, or know people who live there (as do we, for example).
Other excellent sandiegofire maps are at taoe.org and map.sdsu.edu. Some are more recent than the one above.
The Ranch Fire also continues to grow. This map shows its perimeters. And this aerial photo, taken in January 2006, shows that same area, still covered with vegetation, now mostly burned off:
10 Useful Secrets the Major Airlines Don’t Want You to Know, from TravelHacker, via Britt Blaser, whom I’ve never properly thanked for all those nice things he said on my birthday. (That’s a hint to myself to come back at Britt with the same in a few days.)
Just got turned on to SeatExpert.com, which competes with SeatGuru.com, a service I use all the time. Both are exceptionally helpful for choosing seats on airplanes. Always keep one or both open when you choose seats on your booked flights.
Not long ago I had to change flight plans while in the United Red Carpet Club at SFO. The person behind the counter was helpful, but couldn’t answer questions such as “Which window seats are missing windows on this 757?”. So I pulled out my laptop, brought up SeatGuru.com, checked out the United 757-200 page and found out that windows are missing on rows 11 and 12. When I showed the site to the person behind the counter, she was amazed, and gratified that people other than United (with huge help from customers, actually) were filling in the airline’s blanks. Now I see that SeatExpert covers the same bases. With more detail in some cases. The competition should make both better.
Get that heap off the lawn, by Frank Paynter, begins with warm memories of waiting in a frozen parking lot at 2am for my dad to come and jump start our shitty ’52 Buick before someone froze to death.
If that pumpkin brings Steven King to mind, there’s a good reason. The artist (it says here) is Glenn Chadbourne, scary illustrator for the scary author. I know King lives in Maine (and is highly associated with the state), and now (since I just looked him up) see that Chadbourne is quite the Maine dude too. (Which is why I just added the link for him.)
Anyway, all are part of a photo set from the trip, my first to Maine since I drove through there in 1967 with my college pal Barry Bourassa, whose contact info I have long since lost. I’m hoping he’ll look himself up one of these days, find himself mentioned here, and re-connect. Last I saw, he and his wife Cheri had a bed & breakfast up the coast somewhere, I think in Cherryfield. Not sure. Can’t find a sign of it when I try to look it up.
Anyway, the pumpkin above is 404 pounds, and I believe still stands on display in front of King Eider’s Pub, where we had an excellent lunch. There are other pumpkins, mostly of the carved sort (rather than painted like this one), in front of other business establishments up and down the main street of Damariscotta. If you’re in the area, check ’em out.
As Rick Segal reports, I’ve taken a board seat with PlanetEye, a Toronto-based company in the travel space. (One which, as many of you know, I practically live in.) I’m equally excited and flattered to be there, and look forward to helping the PlanetEye bring the Intention Economy to an industry that desperately needs it. If you’re interested in PlanetEye’s beta, by the way, there’s more here.
Took a day trip up through Southern New Hampshire, along Highway 130 from Nashua to Brookline, through the town of Hollis. Picked some apples there at the excellent Linn Farm, then checked out a covered bridge in Brookline (that’s New Hampshire, not Massachusetts) that we’d read about the bridge in the morning’s Boston Globe. Later we found out that the bridge had been built in 2001 on the site (and the concrete supports) of the old FBrookline & Milford Railroad or the Fitchburg Railroad Line, and that it is now part of the Granite Town Rail Trail. The site is just south Potanipo Lake where once stood the largest ice house in New England, the Fresh Pond Ice Cream Company, which once employed up to two hundred people — a population that perhaps exceeds that of the present Brookline itself. Ice would be cut there and shipped to Boston in the days before refrigeration. I suspect that the Ice Cream name derives from one of the purposes to which the ice could be put.