I’m sitting in a bungalow near a babbling creek surrounded by lush, green fields lined with evergreen oaks and nestled amongst rolling, tree-covered hills. This is California and I love it!
At least, this is part of California at a particularly wet time of year. I’m told that for most of the year the creek dries up, the grass dies back and there’s dust everywhere. But right now, where I’m staying in Dry Creek about 10 miles north of Santa Rosa, it’s really beautiful.
I’m planning a trip to North America this winter and I’ve just realised that not only will that mean I’m not very far from SXSW in March but I’ll be in Vancouver on the exact dates of Interaction’09 in February! My problem is that as I will be between jobs I would have to pay for these myself and at $425 and $699, respectively, they’re not cheap.
“Flying produces a fraction of global greenhouse gases” says the reassuring sticker on the seat in front of me. “Ah, well that’s nice. Now that I don’t feel guilty about flying I think I’ll book another holiday!”
But, just for fun, lets look at those stats a little closer…
We left Split on the overnight ferry and arrived in Ancona the following morning after a reasonable night’s sleep on a bench on the deck. Miraculously there was a direct train from Ancona, on the east coast of Italy, to Orte, a not-very-big town on the west coast. We had a four hour wait in the station yet very nearly missed our train due to the ingenious platform numbering system: there are two of every platform. To cut a long story short, (there’s a first time for everything!) we were waiting on platform 3 on one side of the station whereas our train was at platform 3 ovest on the other side of the station. Apparently ovest means ‘west’ which doesn’t make much sense since there isn’t any other direction you can go by train from Ancona. So anyway we made it to Orte where we were met by a lovely young lady who simply said “Sonica? This way!” and guided us to a waiting coach. Neat.
Well once my feet had healed enough for me to walk around a little I got to explore Sarajevo and I absolutely loved it. I can’t even say exactly why but I loved it so much I’m seriously considering moving there!
Well it’s been a while since I wrote anything interesting here but now that I’m travelling and I have things to say, I feel it might be time…
On the return trip from skiing we flew from Lyon airport. They don’t have extending walkways to board the plane so you have to get on a bus which drives you out to it. I know you’ll think I’m making this up but it’s absolutely true: the bus drove in a straight line two bus lengths then stopped to let us out again.
Now,
- It would have been much quicker to walk – in fact the girl at the check-in counter beat us to the plane even though she left after us
- It would have required less staff – a single person to make sure passengers didn’t wander off was all that was needed
- It would have required less equipment – those buses don’t look cheap and they seem to leave the engines running all the time
- It would have allowed us to board much quicker as there would have been a constant flow of passengers boarding rather than two sudden influxes of them (the bus had to make two trips!)
- It’s not required by some awkward EU regulation since in Corsica they let you use your feet – they don’t have any buses that i know of
It’s just sheer madness!
Everybody should visit once. Nobody should have to visit twice.
For some reason we seem to have got all our holiday’s failures grouped into a single day. In many ways that’s not so bad: we can write off today as a necessary expenditure to allow us to have a lovely rest of holiday (woooah, bad grammar – sorry all this Pidgin is getting to me. Actually a lot of it isn’t so much Pidgin but a kind of multilingual pidgin – we had a several kids running after us asking for a ‘stylopen’ (stylo is French for pen)).
Had a fun journey down from Dahab (on red sea coast) to Luxor (on the Nile in the south). It was meant to be a 14 hour night bus but with various stops for food, drinks, picking up passengers, arguing with passers-by and fixing engines it turned into a rather unpleasant 18 hour trip. It wouldn’t even have been so bad if we hadn’t been subjected to a poor quality pirate copy of ‘Double Impact’, a Van Damme film where he plays identical twins and gets to fight himself. When that was all over they just played it again. And when we’d sat through it for the second time? Yep. They played it again.