Tag: Travel

Red Eye

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Last week, I flew to San Francisco for a couple of days to hang out with Eva, Scott, and the girls. The flight over was eleven hours, but went by smoothly. The flight back, however, was another matter. I knew it would be a rough one (flying west to east always is, for me), but the girl sitting next to me deciding it was okay to use me as a back rest, and the guy in front of me thinking it was completely appropriate to throw his seat back, spill my drink, and then continue to lay his head in my lap for the next nine hours, was a bit much. It’s 2024; I thought we had all stopped putting our seat back without at least having a conversation with the person behind you first.

It was worth the fun time in San Francisco, though. Seeing Eva and Scott was really nice, playing video games with the girls was great, and taking a driverless taxi was cool too.

Paris, 2023

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Last August, Joasia and I had a great trip to Paris. It had been a very long time since I had been there, and it had been even longer for Joasia. The city was fantastic, the people were wonderful, and the food was amazing. We went to D’Orsay, which is my favourite museum, did one wing of the Louvre, and made it out to Versailles. We dined in an old wagon of the Orient Express, were serenaded by opera singers, had a wonderful Reuben sandwich from a Jewish deli, saw cemeteries and the catacombs, and much more. I was sad about the Notre-Dame, which had been a highlight of previous trips, but the rest of the trip more than made up for it.

Joasia took a nice photo of me while we were having a drink at a cocktail bar on the first evening.

Coronavirus

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Last week, I was shocked at the rise in the infection rate in the Netherlands. It went from 8 cases to close to 400. Reading up on it a bit more, it seems to have a r0 of between 2 and 3, so that makes sense. Marrying that to the lacks response from the Dutch to take this seriously (cancelling events, closing schools, etc.) and especially to stop the false equivalency to a seasonal flu, made me a little nervous.

I was planning on going to Amsterdam tomorrow, but after waking up this morning to see that the U.S. had shut down air travel between Europe (specifically; Shengen) and the U.S., it didn’t seem outside the realm of possibility to have the U.K. do the same thing while I was over. I decided to rebook my flight for next month instead.

(This is the same trip I was going to take before the airline went into administration, by the way. It seems this trip was cursed.)

Flybe Collapse

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So this morning I woke up to the news that Flybe, the biggest European regional airline operating out of Exeter, has collapsed and are ceasing services immediately. This means my flight for next week isn’t going to be operating, neither is the flight that I had literally booked just yesterday for next month! I’ve instructed my bank to submit two chargeback claims, but who knows whether I’ll get those costs reimberused. I also had to buy a new ticket for next week, so in 24 hours I was down more than £600.

More importantly, this means that from now on getting to and from Amsterdam will be a lot harder than it was before. Until another airline starts operating flights on this route, I’m going to have to flight out from Bristol. There is a bus that goes from Exeter to Bristol airport, but that will eat into an hour or two on each end of my visit to Amsterdam.

Before, I had arranged with my work to give me the Friday afternoon off without having to eat into my vacation time. This would allow me to come into work in the morning, hop into a taxi at noon and make my early afternoon flight. Now, with an extra 2 hours of travel time, I’ll likely not be able to do that, and I doubt my employers will be accommodating enough to allow me to skip all of Friday just so that I can make an early afternoon flight. I’ll see what the commute to the airport will be like next week.

On the way back, I’ll have another extra couple of hours, which means I’ll have to catch an earlier flight than normally. Before, I would take a mid-evening flight, usually around 21:00, and I’d arrive home between 22:00 and 23:00. Now I’ll have to get an late afternoon flight, which means gaming will be jeopardised. I’m hoping to find that the total travel time back isn’t too bad, and I can get a slightly later flight next time which means I won’t have to worry about compromising my gaming time.

I guess that it was quite fortunate that we’ve had such a wonderful connection the last few years.

Norway

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I keep meaning to write about my time in Norway, which was spectacular, but I haven’t really found the time. Now that I’m at home fighting against a bug, I had some time to collect my thoughts. So this won’t be a long post, but a quick recap of the most prominent take-aways. (Disclaimer; the experiences down below are based on my experience in the area around Ålesund.)

The first and most important thing that I took away from Norway is the profound sense of awe at how beautiful the countryside is. Previously, the number one spot for the most amazing country in the world in terms of beauty was Switzerland. The reason why Norway overtook Switzerland was the coastline. One of the things which I may have mentioned on here before is that the idea of living in a land-locked country is disconcerting to me. Sure, there are rivers and lakes aplenty in Switzerland, but it just doesn’t beat a coastline, especially a coastline like that found in Norway. The stillness of the deep fjords is just not something that can be explained in words, or captured in a photograph.

A close second was the absolutely phenomenal infrastructure. From the road network, to the system of ferries, to the nearly ambiguous 4G mobile connection, even in the most remote places! It turns out that when Norway discovered oil off their coast in the mid-20th century, they used a lot of the revenue to upgrade their country’s infrastructure. The country being so large, and thinly populated, it allowed people to live in comfort and luxury in pretty remote places.

Another thing that struck me was that a lot of restaurants closed their kitchens at 19:00 and closed their doors around 20:00. Some restaurants in Ålesund were more accustomed to tourists, but certainly outside of Ålesund it was considered really normal. This meant that we had to eat shitty pizza take away one evening!

That reminds me that everyone always talks about how expensive Norway is to visit, but I didn’t think it was that bad. Don’t get me wrong, it was, but it wasn’t as crazy as I was warned about. Food was probably the thing which was most expensive, comparatively. Inflated by 20% or so, I would say. I’ve been told that prices are a lot higher around bigger cities like Oslo and Bergen.

Lastly, we went to visit the Briksdalsbreen glacier. There is a 45 minute hike through a beautiful valley which leads up to it, and they have sprinkled a lot of different signs with information about geology, meteorology and climate disruption. One of the most impactful thing that they showed was how far into the valley the glacier reached every decade since 1860, when they started measuring. The closer you got to the glacier, the longer it took for another decade marker, showing just how incredibly fast the rate of global warming is increasing.

Here’s a few photos I made which completely don’t do the country any justice whatsoever:

Ålesund from the Aksla viewpoint.

Godøya, west of Ålesund. On the right lies Alnesvatnet, a lake on the island.

Runde island. The puffins are a lie.

The boat through the fjord from Hellesylt to Geiranger.

Edit: Luckily, Joasia and I went to Norway just before the tourist season started. There were some benefits (fewer tourists) and drawbacks (stark weather). Regardless, there were some early bird tourists, like us, and a lot of them arrive by cruise ships, which generally are the worst type of tourist. The stereotypes of the nationalities of tourist tends to be different depending on the place you visit.

In Norway, the stereotypes seemed to be as follows: Chinese tourists yell at one another, no matter how close they are to each other. Indian tourists FaceTime their family members whenever they come across something beautiful. (Ambiguous high speed mobile service, remember?) American tourists fall into one of two categories; either you came in on a cruise, and you’re just there for the gift shops, or you’re a twenty-something and you’ve decided to travel the country by bicycle.