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  • Podcast #194 — Best Laid Travel Plans; Roaming Entropy

    Podcast #194 — Best Laid Travel Plans; Roaming Entropy

    Robot using a laptop to make travel plans while on a beach
    Future of Travel Planning

    Back behind the microphone after, despite my finely tuned travel plans, I had to resort to being stubbornly cranky to fix a ORD connection drama when coming home from a tulip-peeping trip in Holland. We also wander into the world of flâneuring, aimlessly walking around a city as a way to swerve over-tourism. Listeners weigh in on Priority Pass lounge access and online passport renewal experiences, and I count all the apps I needed to go cashless in Holland. All this and more – click here to download the podcast file, go up to the Subscribe section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.

    Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #194:

    Since The Last Episode

    • Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
    • Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a good bit of travel – 10 days in the Netherlands bracketed by road trips to Louisville, Savannah, GA, and Chicago, and then a tough week of beer drinking here in Nashville when the Craft Brewers Conference touched down. So, I’ve been keeping occupied since the last episode. But it’s all been personal travel; all of my business travel has been replaced with Zoom and Teams sessions. I may be a bit of an outlier, but none of the US airlines’ Q1 earnings announcements were great, in no small part because business travel still isn’t back to pre-pandemic levels. Delta is hoping it’ll settle at 75% of 2019 levels while United’s CEO said  “We believe demand is just structurally different than it was pre-pandemic, and we’re still figuring out that new normal.” Maybe not quite the Bill Gates “over 50 percent of business travel… will go away” prediction, but with our 2-year crash course in virtual work, having the post-pandemic setpoint for business travel volume be 20-25% lower doesn’t seem too far fetched.
    • And even with the non-business “revenge” travel boom filling seats, personal travel is a lot more price sensitive, or elastic as economists like to say, than business travel. My travel patterns are a testament to that — with higher airfares but a more flexible schedule (I can Zoom from anywhere), it’s been more road trips than plane flights. I’ve had some pretty drives, like through East Tennessee and central Kentucky, but also some real grind-outs, like I-75 pretty much from the Tennessee-Georgia border through Atlanta, all the way down to Macon. 
    • But driving does make packing easier, without the space constraints of a carry-on bag. Which caught up with me, I think, on our Netherlands trip. I was out of practice, sloppy; forgetting to pack so much of what would be my normal kit — collapsible umbrella, gloves, hat — so that when the cold rain shifted to snow our first day in Amsterdam (it had been in the 70’s when we left Nashville), our standard throwaway line “If we’ve forgotten it, we’ll just buy it there” became very real. I was very happy to find a couple of sporting goods stores a block down from our hotel. I gotta do some remedial packing training before my next flight.
    • Bridge Music — Sunset Boulevard by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm

    Following Up

    • Robert Fenerty hit the TravelCommons website to comment on last episode’s thoughts about ponying up for a not-quite-Amex Platinum card from Chase or Capital One, one that includes a Priority Pass membership. He said
      • “You need to fix the cert on travelcommons.com, Safari is complaining.” Yup, I know. Converting the site to https has been on my to-do list for a long time. I’ll get to it, I promise… some day.
      • “Given the paucity of direct flights from Nashville, I suppose lounge access makes sense. But please don’t get a credit card just for Priority Pass access. I’ve had one for years through my Chase Sapphire Reserve card. But even as a 1K flier, I rarely use it. With Priority Pass, you’ll encounter capacity-controlled second-rate lounges where travelers on certain flights stroll past you while you’re being added to the 45-minute wait list. And after your 45 minute wait you’ll be treated to a sardine-packed lounge where the primary benefits are lack of blaring TVs, cat food sandwiches, and a second-rate chair that might adjoin an electrical outlet.
      • “Every time I buy a bold $20 glass of Cabernet at a Vino Volo or sip a remarkable east coast hazy at an airport bar with 20 taps, I think about how happy I am to not be begging for a second rate drink at a second rate lounge.”
      • Agree that Priority Pass members definitely seem to be on the bottom of the “priority” list. I’ve been on the other side of that 45-minute wait list, walking into a lounge in ORD’s international terminal, bypassing the queue of Priority Pass holders because I had an AirFrance business class ticket. I’ve also encountered the cat-food sandwich phenomenon. I guess that’s why Amex’s Centurion Lounge is so popular — great food, nice local beers and top-shelf liquor — and so crowded and now charging for each guest. Food and drink costs during connections — another thing I forgot to factor in when I moved to a non-hub city.
    • Jim McDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page to pile onto my rant about the US’s stop-start on-line passport renewal efforts.
      • I have dual citizenship with the US and Ireland. Getting an Irish passport was a bureaucratic nightmare and took a couple of years from beginning to end. I saw it was expiring at the end of 2022 and went on-line to see how to renew it. Turns out there was a simple application to fill out on-line, got my wife to take a photo of me against a neutral background and uploaded it, paid by credit card, and had a new Irish passport in my mailbox five business days later. It can be done, USA. Try harder.
      • Jim’s comment got me looking… and sure enough, I can renew my UK passport online also. And checking the US passport renewal page just before recording says the online renewal portal is still paused — we’re coming up on the 4th month of that pause. Maybe the US State Dept just needs to buy Ireland’s or the UK’s system rather than trying to build their own.
    • One of the TravelCommons’ thru lines over the past 5-6 years has been the move to a cashless society and me being a bit of a knuckle dragger about it. It’s a stuttering progress — tripping over small cash-only family-run restaurants in Chicago and here in Nashville, card-only places in Amsterdam; a long weekend in Croatia last fall, before they switched to the euro, that had me hunting down ATMs because not only were there signs saying “Cash Only” but also “Kuna Only” — the currency that would be defunct in a couple of months. The Netherlands, like I said, was all about the tap — double-click the iPhone, tap the little block, and hear the ding. I hit an ATM for €200 through force of habit and after 10 days, came home with €40-50 of it. But looking at my iPhone halfway through the trip, it looked like I’d traded cash for apps. I tweeted a screenshot of my phone; I’d added 9 apps to my phone just for those 10 days. Four were for different transit systems – one for Amsterdam, one for Rotterdam, one for the bus from Haarlem down to the tulip gardens, and one for the trains between them. There was Bolt, the Uber/taxicab mash-up, and Donkey Republic to unlock rental bikes. I can go cashless — as long as my phone battery holds out.
    • Back in December, right after ChatGPT was released/unleashed (?) on the world, I wrote a blog post comparing its holiday travel tips to mine. I thought the ChatGPT recommendations were fine, but mine were way more insightful. Now that Google and Microsoft have joined the AI chat game, I thought I’d ask all three “What’s the TravelCommons Podcast like”
      • First, ChatGPT’s response: “The TravelCommons podcast is a podcast that focuses on travel experiences and insights. Hosted by travel enthusiast and former consultant Mark Peacock, the podcast covers a range of topics related to travel, from the latest news and trends to personal travel stories and tips.
      • “Listeners can expect to hear Peacock’s own experiences and anecdotes about his travels, as well as interviews with other travel experts and enthusiasts. The podcast often covers topics related to technology and travel, such as the latest travel apps and gadgets, as well as discussions about travel safety, sustainable travel, and more.
      • “One of the unique aspects of the TravelCommons podcast is that Peacock often records episodes while he’s on the road, providing listeners with a firsthand account of his travel experiences. This adds an element of excitement and immediacy to the podcast, making it feel like you’re right there with Peacock as he explores new destinations.
      • “Overall, if you’re a travel enthusiast or just looking for some inspiration for your next trip, the TravelCommons podcast is definitely worth checking out.”
      • Not bad, though it’s been a while since I’ve recorded on the road. Maybe I need to get back to that to recapture some of the “excitement and immediacy” of the older episodes.
      • Next up, Google’s Bard: “The TravelCommons podcast is a weekly podcast for frequent travelers. The host, Matt Kepnes, shares his insights and advice on all things travel, from planning and booking trips to navigating airports and hotels. He also interviews experts in the travel industry, such as airline pilots, hoteliers, and travel writers.
      • “The podcast is well-produced and informative, and Matt’s enthusiasm for travel is contagious. He makes even the most mundane travel topics interesting, and he always has a few tips up his sleeve to help you make the most of your trips.”
      • Uh, no. Somehow Bard has transferred TravelCommons to Nomadic Matt. I think I need to check and make sure I still own the travelcommons.com domain name.
      • And finally, Microsoft’s Bing Chat which is powered by the most recent version of ChatGPT: “TravelCommons is a podcast that focuses on the experience of travel. It is hosted by Mark Peacock, who is a frequent traveler himself. The podcast covers a wide range of topics related to travel, including tips for packing and planning, reviews of airlines and hotels, and discussions about the latest trends in travel. The podcast has been around since 2005 and has a loyal following of listeners who appreciate its honest and informative approach to travel.”
      • That’s pretty spot on! I may have to update the TravelCommons media guide with that.
    • And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send ’em along to comments@travelcommons.com — you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page like Jim or the Instagram account at travelcommons — or, if you can fight thru the Safari security warnings like Robert did, you can post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.
    • Bridge Music — Memories (infiniti loop) by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: TheDice

    Best Laid Travel Plans…

    • The first topic in the last episode was “Still Overthinking Travel Planning” — which I do because, well, I’ve spent a good bit of my waking life traveling. But kinda like how generals always fight the last war, I’m probably not doing a great job of accounting for the changes in today’s travel landscape — full planes and hotels, limited flexibility, taking what you can get.
    • Living in Nashville, a non-hub city, means, more often than not, I have to plan for a connection, especially when choosing our flight home from Amsterdam in April, having to factor in the time needed to pass through Customs, maybe having to transit from an international to a domestic terminal, having to clear TSA security again — all in addition to some cushion for a late flight. But when I looked across all our possible connections, the times were either snug, less than 2 hours, or boringly long, 4-6 hours. So I decided to risk it, taking the snug layover through ORD. I figured we knew the airport, so no time lost trying to figure out the terminal connection, and most importantly, if we did get caught up somewhere and missed our connection, there was another flight to Nashville at 6pm, some 4 hours later.
    • As you might guess, all didn’t go smoothly because if it did, I wouldn’t be talking about it on the podcast. There’s not much interesting about “I booked a snug connection and everything was fine.” It actually started to go off the rails a few days before our departure, on our last night in Rotterdam. We stayed at the Hotel Pincoffs on the left bank — highly recommended — and after dinner, we hit the lounge where ordered a glass of what was labeled a Dutch coastal gin called Hermit, skipping the tonic as I talked about in episode #192, so I could taste the botanicals and the salty water they plugged on the label.  I liked it a lot, so much so that I ordered another glass, and then spent 3 hours the next day rummaging through Amsterdam liquor stores ‘til I found a bottle to take home. Which meant I was now checking my bag on my flight to ORD.
    • Two days later, our snug connection begins to decay. The inbound United flight was late which dominoed out our departure time by 20 minutes. The captain said not to worry, he’d push the throttle and make it up in the air. I’ve heard that promise before, and sure enough, we hit the gate 20 minutes late. OK, snug-ger, but still doable. The Global Entry kiosk was fast, almost too fast. ORD has new facial biometric kiosks. I walked up and before I figured out how to use it, it had recognized my face and told me to move on. Slightly creepy, but that’s a topic for another episode.
    • We find the luggage carousel just as the bags with the orange Priority tags start popping out. I let myself feel a bit optimistic. I’m watching for my gin-bearing bag. And watch. And watch. Non-priority bags come out. Still I’m watching. And feeling optimism decay. We work through the Customs exit line only to walk straight into an even longer line to recheck our bags for our Nashville flight. Only 2, 3 people are working it. I’m feeling like Stevie Ray Vaughn when he sings “tick tock, people, time’s ticking away.” I tweet a picture to United saying “I’d be pretty thrilled if I made my ORD-BNA connection after our AMS-ORD flight arrived late.” No response. We finally get up to the bag checker. She scans the bag tag; I can see her screen flash red. “Nope,” she says, “You won’t make your flight” and then turns to the next person in line. 
    • We stand there for a moment and then drag our bags over to the line for the re-booking agent. But as I’ve said many times on this podcast, work all the channels. My usual Twitter play didn’t seem to be working (United’s social media hub must be short-staffed), so I dial up the Premiere line and tell my entire tale of woe to the phone agent while still in line for the in-person one. Getting up to the ORD agent, I tell her the same thing; United’s delay caused me to miss my connection, so just book me on the 6pm to Nashville. Seems easy enough — but not in today’s travel world. The rebooking agent tells me there are no seats left to Nashville today… on any carrier. “This is unacceptable,” I said. She goes palms up and turns to the next person in line. “Wait,” I said, “if you can’t get me home tonight, United owes me overnight accommodations.” She stopped, thought for a moment, and then wrote down a number. “You need to call them.” It was the same number I’d called while in line.
    • But though all that, I hadn’t hung up on that phone agent; she was still there. “I’m sorry but there are no seats to Nashville, but I can get you to Memphis.” She’s trying to help, but I don’t think she realizes that Tennessee is a long state — Memphis is a 3-hour drive to Nashville. “This is unacceptable,” I said. She apologizes again. 15 minutes into the call, she offers to transfer me to her supervisor. I tell her my story with perhaps a little frustration creeping into my tone. “Can I put you on hold?” she asks. Sure, why not? In the meantime, Irene is checking on Southwest flight; apparently United agents can’t see them. The supervisor eventually comes back, “Would the 6pm flight be OK for you?” 6pm today? After 36 minutes on the phone and saying “This is unacceptable” 2 or 3 times, they scrounged up the seats I’d been asking for all along. We hopped on the AirTrain to get over to Terminal 1 and Tortas Frontera, my favorite ORD restaurant, for a couple of unplanned margaritas. While checking the United app for my new boarding pass, I saw that United twitter had finally responded. “We’re sorry about the stressful day you’ve had today. As a gesture of goodwill, we’re able to deposit 2,500 miles into each of your accounts.” Using a 1.5¢/mile conversion rate, that just about covered our Frontera tab. In today’s travel world, that’s probably the best outcome I could’ve hoped for.
    • Bridge Music —Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead & Robert Seikawitch by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license

    Roaming Entropy

    • Well before this “revenge” travel boom, over-tourism was a trending topic. I talked about it on many past episodes – biking up to Delicate Arch in Moab, Utah to find a swarm of photographers setting up to get their “golden hour shot” at sunset; trying to get in front of unloading tour buses along Iceland’s Golden Circle, and most recently squeezing through narrow streets in Rome when I made the mistake of agreeing to meet a friend at Trevi Fountain.
    • But, as you might guess, that’s not my preferred touring style. Instead, I tend to do what my family calls my “solo toro” routine — going off on my own to wander a city, randomly walking, letting traffic lights make the call when it’s time to make a turn. Often I’ll have some end-point in mind — a taproom, a church — but my path getting there won’t be the most direct.
    • I didn’t think this was unique, but still, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to run across a couple of articles that put a proper name to this — flâneuring, from flâneur, the (of course) French word from the 19th Century that means “a stroller, a loafer, a wanderer,” someone who walks around a city without a fixed destination or purpose, just observing and enjoying the sights, sounds and smells. The English author Virginia Woolfe called it “street haunting” which I like, but I think my favorite term is “roaming entropy,” coined by some NYU researchers whose work showed a positive correlation between someone’s mood and how many new/varied/unexpected locations they visited.
    • “Roaming entropy,” “experiential diversity,” they say, promotes cognitive development — which makes sense to me. In many ways, this is one of the main reasons people travel, to experience something new. Way back in episode #166, Emily Thomas talked about how philosophers such as Descartes and Montagne thought experiencing “otherness of travel” was important to broadening your mind, forcing you to think past your familiar experiences. But many folks want to experience something new, but without the risk of disappointment — or something worse — that the term “roaming entropy” implies. And there’s nothing new to that. Guidebooks have been around forever. When Irene and I started traveling through Europe, we’d always carry a Green Michelin guide, and we’d check off the 1-, 2-, and 3-star sites as we’d hit them. Not really all that different from people today queuing up for selfies at an Instagram-famous spot.
    • But ticking off a list of Insta-sites or starred spots doesn’t open you to the possibility of serendipitous delight, the joy of discovering something unexpected. On the flip side, it does tend to keep you out of serendipitous disaster. I don’t recall my wanders putting me in harm’s way, but there have been a few times where I felt I’d pushed the envelope a bit far — in Cape Town, J’burg; in Brussels — and so beat a very direct, non-random retreat to someplace safer. 
    • The NYU researchers also talked about “sociodemographic experiential variability,” which is their polysyllabic way of describing walking around in different ethnic/cultural neighborhoods during flâneuring. I’m always hitting up food carts for, say, tamales in Mexican neighborhoods, or not-really-well-defined meats on skewers in Asian night markets, or Cuban coffee joints in Miami. Come to think of it, a lot of my sociodemographic experiential variability involves food or booze. Though in my defense, if you keep stopping to buy stuff, you then have to carry it around with you the rest of the day, weighing you down, maybe forcing you to shorten your walk. And that’s not what “roaming entropy” is about. It’s all about riding the random wave. 

    Closing

    • Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
    • OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #194
    • I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
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    • If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.
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  • Podcast #182 — More COVID Changes; Words That Mean Adventure

    Podcast #182 — More COVID Changes; Words That Mean Adventure

    COVID rapid test results
    Cleared to Adventure

    Back in front of the microphone after a two-week trip to the UK, getting back home just before the new Omicron travel restrictions hit. We talk about getting to London, surfing the waves of changing travel requirements, a new way to renew Global Entry, moan a bit more about the inexorable advance of the cashless society, and finish up talking with Josh Glenn about his new book The Adventurer’s Glossary. All this and more – click here to download the podcast file, go up to the Subscribe section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.

    Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #182:

    Since The Last Episode

    • Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
    • Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois a couple of weeks since getting back from two weeks in the UK — a week in London and a week of hiking in Southern Wales. Had really great weather for the back half of November — brisk temperatures, but more sun than we expected; certainly a bit windy when walking the cliffs above the Atlantic, but nothing that we couldn’t layer up for; and only one day of real rain. It was a lot better than the weather forecasts had led us to expect.
    • The trip over and back was pretty uneventful. I’d hit American on a mileage sale back in March for direct flights between ORD and LHR. We flew coach on a Triple 7 that was pretty empty on the way over. People were popping up the armrests in the 4-seat center section and laying down to sleep. One guy even built a little tent out of blankets to cover his head. I’m not sure if he was trying to block the cabin lights or maybe he was concerned people walking down the aisles would breathe on him while he slept (though mask discipline was very solid) or maybe he wanted to drop his mask while he slept and didn’t want to get called out by the flight attendants. Whatever his deal was, it looked a little weird.
    • I ate dinner on that flight even though I’d eaten a cubano sandwich at Tortas Frontera, my favorite ORD restaurant, right before boarding. I took the meal not because I was hungry but because it gave me an excuse to drop my mask for a little bit on that 8-hr flight. Rather than the “replace your mask between bites and sips” rules that I heard on domestic flights this year, on my international flights over the past couple of months, most everyone takes off their mask for the duration of the meal. I don’t know if this difference comes from emptier planes, longer flights, or that international fliers are less likely to try to get around mask rules (and, purely my own experience, I haven’t seen any passenger pushback on masks on any of my international flights, whereas I was seeing/hearing a lot of it on domestic flights earlier this year), but I appreciate the flexibility/pragmatism (?) on these long flights.
    • While the plane wasn’t full, I was worried about passport control when we got to Heathrow. There’s always a bit of suspense anyways as you make the long walk from the plane to passport control. Did a whole bunch of Triple 7’s disgorge at the same time, let alone some massive A-380’s? Did the immigration force botch their workforce scheduling up? Will we flow smoothly into the immigration hall or will our march suddenly stop short?  Worse, will we smack into one of those Heathrow e-gate failures that has caused 2-4 hour queues over the past couple of months? 
    • We kept moving, but then came to a sudden stop as we made the final turn toward the hall. Looking around the line, I could see the room wasn’t jammed — good sign. It looked like they’d paused us for a minute while they rejiggered their cowpen zig-zag line. After a minute or two, we started moving again, and at a pretty good clip with almost everyone getting pointed to the automated e-gates. I walked up, put my passport on the reader, a camera box popped up, mechanically adjusted to my height, and then after what I assume was some facial recognition analysis, opened the gate and let me go to baggage claim. No “how long are you going to be in the country” quiz, which I didn’t miss, but also no stamp in my passport. How am I going to remember this trip for my next Global Entry renewal. Guess I’ll have to drink a beer or two while I’m here so it shows up on my Untappd history.
    • Bridge Music — dazed by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone

    Following Up

    • Speaking of Global Entry, back in episode #180 at the end of October, I was still waiting for my renewal approval and compare my month-and-a-half and counting wait with listener Jerry Sarfati’s 2-day wait. Then, the day before we left for the UK, I got an email with the subject line “TTP (Trusted Traveler Program) Application Status Change” telling me to check the website for more information. Logging in, I saw that I’d been given conditional approval, so about 2 months from submitting my renewal application. I still had to do an interview, but if I was reading everything correctly, I had 12 months to get that done. I looked to see if ORD had an appointment available the day we were flying back from London, but no dice. The earliest appointment was mid-December. OK, I’ll think about it later. No rush; I have 12 months. But the next day, I got another email from dhs.gov telling me about a new program, Enrollment-On-Arrival, where I could knock out my interview while in the customs/immigration area coming back from an international trip, no appointment necessary. Perfect!
    • So that Monday afternoon after a quick pass-through the Global Entry kiosk, I went looking for Booth 58 which is where, according to the Enrollment-On-Arrival website, was where the ORD interviews would be. But it looked like getting to Booth 58 would mean standing in a long and growing line of non-US passengers. Ah, forget it. Again, I have 12 months to get this done. But the luggage carousel for our flight hadn’t even started turning yet, so I went up to one of the customs officers and asked her. She immediately pointed me to a guy in a booth completely separate from the rest of the immigration traffic, and in the complete opposite direction of Booth 58. There was one guy in front of me getting his interview, but by the time I stepped up to the officer, there was a family of 4 and two other people behind me. The interview took about 5 minutes. I walked out and our luggage carousel still wasn’t moving. By the end of the day, the TTP website showed my Global Entry was good for another 5 years. Full credit to DHS for coming up with ways to make Global Entry easier. I just wish they’d keep their website locator up-to-date.
    • In the last episode, we talked about how last year’s flurry of vaccination passport app announcements has pretty much turned out to be, in the words of Macbeth, “a tale, Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing” But American Airlines’ partnership with Verifly did actually have a little something to it. I downloaded the app and, after wrestling through what is not the most intuitive interface, was able to see a list of the UK travel requirements and then validate that I met them, by uploading pictures of Irene’s and my vaccination cards and our passenger locator form QR codes. That’s nice, but what was better was when we checked in for our flight, all we had to do was show the agent the green “All good” screens for Irene and me and we were done. None of the fishing out the right forms and holding them up to the lucite screen. Two swipes on the phone and we were done. Nothing earth-shattering, but it does relieve the friction out of one part of the journey
    • A recurring topic on the TravelCommons podcast is the move to a cashless society. And certainly the pandemic accelerated this with the push toward contactless transactions; nobody wanted to handle your possibly-infectious cash. On our first day in London, on our walk to pick up our COVID tests, I stopped at the first ATM I saw to pull out £100, just to have some cash in my wallet. I’m a bit old-school in that way. And I’m glad I did it because once we left London and were staying in small towns in South Wales, it was really tough to find an ATM. Now, this shouldn’t be that big a deal with everyone taking cards and contactless, be it a card or on the phone with Google or Apple Pay, doing away (mostly) with the need for a PIN or to sign anything. But in Wales, the parking lots at the base of our hikes, the pay-&-display machines, weren’t taking my cards, either contactless or physical. And by the time we were in our last town, Hay-on-Wye, I’d run out of coins and needed to find an ATM. Google Maps was no help; it kept pointing me to phantom machines in little grocery stores. Irene had better luck in the tourist information center. The woman there gave us directions to what she said was the one remaining ATM in town — which surprised me because Hay-on-Wye has a good bit of tourist traffic with their book festivals. But anyhow, we found it and it worked; it had cash. Of course, then we had to find something like a coffee shop that would take cash so we could break a bill and get coins for the machine, which knocked out any of the usual chains. Walking down the street, I found a place that looked indy enough — the sign said “coffee shop” but it looked more like a thrift store. Sure enough, the guy was happy to take cash, though he had to pull out his wallet to make change. 
    • We’ve talked about Hertz’s downward service spiral, which I forecasted in episode #164 after their bankruptcy filing. But since I haven’t held back in slamming them for empty lots in Phoenix and San Diego, and for incorrect fuel charges, I need to give kudos to the Hertz location in Cardiff in Wales for what had to be, hands down, the easiest and therefore best Hertz transaction I’ve had in Europe. Leaving London for the Welsh hiking part of our trip, we decided to skip the fun and excitement of driving in London and instead took a train to Cardiff and then drove to the coast from there. The Hertz place was about a 10-min cab ride from the train station in a bit of an auto dealer row. I walked in, showed the woman my Illinois drivers license, she asked me if I’d be OK driving an automatic (how fast can I say “Yes!”), gave me a key, and pointed me to a grey Skoda in the back lot. Done; no hard upsell on enhanced insurance or refueling options, just “Here’s the key; have a good trip”. And then returning the car, I pulled in after gassing it up; the guy took a quick walk around it; had me sign his screen, and we were done. And nothing wonky when I looked at the emailed receipt. It’s sorta damning with faint praise that I’m so impressed when a transaction goes smoothly. It should always be this easy, but it rarely is.
    • And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send ’em along to comments@travelcommons.com — you can send a Twitter message to @mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons — or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.
    • Bridge Music — A Thousand And None by Speck (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/57256 Ft: Mr_Yesterday

    Yet More COVID Changes

    • I mentioned in the last episode that I was a little concerned about the logistics of getting COVID testing done by our second day in London. But it turned out fine. With a bit of Googling, I found Randox, a big UK test firm, offering “click & collect” rapid antigen tests for $25 a piece. It gave us a good reason, a destination for a post-arrival walk. It’s always good to spend a lot of time in the sunlight on that first day in Europe; I find it’s key to resetting my body clock. We did them in our hotel room the next morning. Yet more suspense — waiting those 15 minutes, hoping that second pink line wouldn’t materialize, and then taking a picture of it in Randox’s app to get the “all clear” email back.
    • Of course, this was all pre-Omicron. That bombshell dropped the weekend before we flew home which had me back doing the rounds on Google, trying to figure out what travel requirements were changing. The UK quickly added pre-departure tests and shifted their Day 2 testing back to the more sensitive — but 3 times more expensive — PCR tests. But we were already in the UK. What mattered to us getting back to Chicago. The communications out of the US were less clear; mostly rumors; nothing official. The rumors were: tightening the window on pre-departure tests — from 72 hours to 24 hours before departure, which could’ve been a problem for us; we’d already done the Abbott rapid antigen tests we’d brought from home Saturday afternoon before Monday morning departure. And adding a post-arrival test, similar to the UK’s. But the worst rumor was requiring a 7-day quarantine even with a negative test. Lucky for us, none of these US rumors came true — at least by the Monday morning of our flight. 
    • It wasn’t until later in the week the new rules were announced and it seems that folks had come to their senses a bit. The only rumor that came true was tightening the testing window down to 1 day. Well, that and extending the airplane mask requirement to March 2022, but as I said back in September in episode #179, I don’t think that was a surprise to anyone. Going to a 1-day window just reinforces the case for bringing a rapid antigen test with you. The only caveat is that the test has to be done in concert with a telehealth call to validate it’s actually you doing the test and the results are really negative. Coming home from Italy and the UK, Irene and I used Abbott BinaxNow tests with telehealth sessions from eMed. Depending on how many you buy (2, 3 or 6-pack), the cost per test ranges from $25 to $35, which is pretty competitive with the prices I saw for airport same-day testing services and it’s a helluva lot more convenient. Though as I recommended in this year’s travelers gift guide, some sort of smartphone tripod comes in handy when the eMed guy wants to watch you swirl the cotton swab in your nose and then insert it into the test kit. Not sure how you’d do all that one-handed.
    • I hate the term “the new normal”, but perhaps, at least for the near term, we have to think about changes in COVID restrictions the same way we think about storms, terrorism, and strikes — work to avoid them, but be flexible, agile enough to deal with it if you get caught. Now no analogy is perfect. Back in episode #150, I told the story of how a bomb threat on the train line into Paris caused us to our flight home. It’s a lot easier to accept a couple of bonus days in Paris than an unplanned quarantine week in an airport Holiday Inn.
    • Bridge Music — Foolish Game by copperhead (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/46390 Ft: Snowflake,Sackjo22

    Words We Use for Adventure

    • We know that words impact the ways we think, feel, experience things — including travel. Josh Glenn, a Boston-based author and semiotician (semiotics, the study of signs, symbols, and language, and how they create meaning) has just published a book The Adventurer’s Glossary, with some 500 words associated with adventure. And since going on an adventure often involves travel, I wanted to talk to Josh about his book and how the words that we use to describe adventure could affect how we think about travel.
      • Mark: Josh, how do you read The Adventurer’s Glossary?  It’s an alphabetical list of words, terms, and their not-quite-Oxford-Dictionary definitions. They’re really more stories than definitions. Should I start at the top (0-Dark-Hundred is the first entry) and work my way through? Or just randomly riff through the pages, open it, put my finger down and read something?
      • Josh: It’s sort of a capricious decision to alphabetize all these terms because that just completely put them out of order. So all of the travel terms are not together, and all of the military terms are not together, and the stuff I got from hip hop or gaming culture or adventure literature, none of them are grouped together. It could just be something you pick up and randomly browse through. It’s absolutely okay. However, as much as possible, I did try to edit it in such a way that if you were reading it from beginning to end it would kind of make sense in that direction as well. So if there’s a little bit of beginning to end stuff in it, but really it’s read randomly.
      • Mark: How did you choose which words to include? It’s a pretty wide-ranging list. You’ve got bottle, hair, stoic, as well as the stuff that I would normally associate with adventure like bug-out bag, roam, and voyageur.
      • Josh: This is the third glossary that I’ve done. I did one back in 2008 called The Idler’s Glossary which was all about basically how much I hate having a regular job and enjoy doing things that look like you’re doing nothing from the outside but actually, it might be very rich and deep what you’re doing. And then I did another book called The Wage Slave’s Glossary, which was about how much I hate my job. And I was working at the Boston Globe at the time. Actually, a job I kind of liked, but I just don’t like having bosses and it was all about the horrible jargon of the workplace. Basically, these are topics I’ve been interested in for many, many years and I just started gathering words as I also read a lot of adventure novels and watch a lot of adventure movies. So sort of gathering words that occurred to me over time. But then I also do really nerdy things like literally sit down and read through a slang dictionary or pick up a thesaurus and go look up the definitions and the etymology of every synonym for a certain word. So the list balloons; I think there’s something like 500 words in this book.
      • Mark: So Josh, we think about adventure. Adventure often involves travel. Do you think that the language or the words that we use to describe adventure impact our expectations of how we travel?
      • Josh: The language of our culture helps shape and guide the way we are able to perceive and think about anything including adventure and travel. We can’t think outside of this kind of structure of language that we have. I mean an adventure is, and that word comes from the Latin meaning to arrive unexpectedly. That’s actually really an important philosophical piece for me as I was going through this, the idea that you can have a trip is not an adventure if nothing unexpected happens and if you don’t take enough risks to allow things unexpected to happen. So when I think back to the amazing road trips I took when I was in college with my friends around the country, it’s all kind of a blur. I don’t really remember a lot of specific details except when something went wrong — when we broke down in the middle of the highway on a mountain in Colorado and we had to go to a small town and have people that help us get parts and explore that town and meet the locals and almost get beat up etcetera, etcetera. That’s an adventure. Something unexpected happened and it’s very, very memorable. Those are the memories that you cherish later.
      • Mark: I think that’s probably where travel stories come from are more of the things that you didn’t expect, more of the hiccups. God only knows on this podcast, most of the stories that I’ll tell have come from things that went sideways, not things that went well.
      • Josh: It’s so interesting to think more about how that’s really baked right into our language. So for example, the word chance comes from the Latin cadentia meaning falling. So just when we think about how we use the words of “let the chips fall where they may” or “something befalls you”, this idea of having our feet off the ground, falling through space, we can’t grasp anything, what do you do with that? If you’re someone who likes, in some kind of existential way, that feeling of falling, then you’re an adventurer. You’re going to get more out of your travel experiences than someone who wants everything to be exactly the same way every time and never have any hiccups.
      • Mark: In a prior episode, we talked with Emily Thomas, philosophy professor at Durham University in the UK, and she wrote a book The Meaning of Travel. And one of the things that we got talking about was this idea of travel giving you a sense of otherness, so taking you out of your comfort zone and putting you in the middle of something different ,and what you experience out of that, both from where you are as well as within yourself. And I think about that a little bit, as you think about, you’re putting yourself into a potential adventure. You don’t know where you’re going, you’re just putting yourself into a situation and figuring it out.
      • Josh: I like how you’re saying “put yourself into… “ Of course, another aspect of adventure is getting yourself out of the ordinary.
      • Mark: Yes, getting you out of that small town without getting your ass kicked.
      • Josh: Yeah, getting out of your routine, getting out of your small town, getting out of the kind of the spell that the quotidian everyday life casts on us, this kind of enchantment or bewitchment where you just want, you just expect everything to be the same all the time. Travel is one of the great ways, you know historically, traveling to other cultures and seeing the world, seeing how people live in other places. These are great ways to kind of break that spell of enchantment that every day puts on us.
      • Mark: Josh, the act of travel has come under pressure of late. Pre-pandemic that was starting to see a thread of travels perhaps of frivolous luxury that was killing the planet through carbon emissions and global warming, maybe overcrowding of specific places like Machu Picchu or Angkor Wat. And now in the time of Covid, there seems another riff which is — travel is a selfish act because it hastens the spread of coronavirus around the world. How do we square this? How do we square these concepts of travel being negative with the need for adventure, that need for escape and the ability therefore to find ourselves?
      • Josh: You can’t entirely square, I do think that there is some truth to those criticisms. We shouldn’t be spreading disease and we shouldn’t be destroying the planet by unnecessary travel. But then the question is “what’s necessary and how often do we do it?” Maybe if you’re somebody who travels 100 times a year, maybe that’s too much. But maybe if you travel once a year, that’s not enough. But I do think that for me anyway, during Covid, I didn’t travel really at all outside of Boston, New Hampshire and Vermont, but I traveled widely through reading adventure novels, watching movies and Google Streets where you can walk around inside the Sistine Chapel remotely. Of course these are not as good — just the same as Zoom calls are not the same as being in the same room with someone. It’s not as soul nourishing, you don’t get as much out of it. You’re not really experiencing the whole context that you get when you travel, but you can have sort of armchair adventures to some extent that helps square that circle. But yeah, there’s no right answer to that.
      • Mark: Yeah, absolutely. Josh, as you think about The Adventure’s Glossary, how should people think about it, take it, enjoy it?
      • Josh: I hope that word nerds will enjoy it just on its own merits. However, there is kind of a secret philosophy woven through this alphabetized list of words, which is this idea that adventure is something that we should seek. We should try to break out of the ordinary and see things in a new way and expand our horizons, whether it’s through actual literal travel or other ways, and that there are certain qualities that we need to cultivate in ourselves to be good adventurers. Whether that’s a sense of humor, whether that’s wit, whether that’s courage, grit and so forth. These are all the kinds of things that I’ve tried to express through this book, which from the outside might just look like a fun, slightly frivolous word nerd book.
      • Mark: Josh Glenn, thanks very much for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. We’ll put a link to The Adventurer’s Glossary so people can find it.
      • Josh: Thank you for having me and happy travels to all your listeners.

    Closing

    • Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
    • OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #182
    • I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
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  • Podcast #178 — What Remains from Pandemic Times; Best Restaurant and Bars

    Podcast #178 — What Remains from Pandemic Times; Best Restaurant and Bars

    I Feel Safer Already

    Last month’s travel got me wondering what travel changes are going to stick after the COVID pandemic begins to recede. With all the restaurant and bar closures caused by COVID lockdowns, I’m updating my recommendations list based on recent travels. And I’m way overthinking our first post-lockdown international trip. All this and more – click here to download the podcast file, go up to the Subscribe section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.

    Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #178:

    Since The Last Episode

    • Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
    • Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a much lighter travel schedule than before the last episode. The day after posting the July episode, Irene and I got back in the car (because those 12-hour drives to and from the East Coast just weren’t enough for me), but this time heading north, as I mentioned at the end of the last episode, to Traverse City, MI to do Paddle for Pints with some friends; it’s a taproom crawl, but in kayaks instead of on streets. It’s a lot of fun. There’s something about physical exertion while drinking that seems to justify the next beer. 
    • Now, anyone who’s driven any distance through the Midwest knows there’s only two seasons here — winter and construction season — and we didn’t get too far outside of Chicago on I-90 before a merge down to single lane traffic ground traffic to a crawl and I started refreshing Waze and Google Maps looking for alternatives. I’ve said in past episodes that, even though Google owns both, my experience is they can recommend different routes, especially in high-traffic, fast-changing situations. To me, Waze feels a little “twitchier”; it’ll twist you down a half-dozen random side streets to save 30 seconds while Google Maps guesses you’re willing to suck it up for a couple more minutes in exchange for a simpler route. And that’s exactly what happened to us in northwest Indiana which leaves me trying to figure out which route to take. I tweeted out later (actually while on a snack break in a taproom in Grand Rapids) “ I really hate it when Google Maps and Waze fight” to which the Waze social media crew replied “We like to think of it more as a disagreement”. Nicely done. And then Jim McDonough, a long-time TravelCommons listener, added “Apple Maps breaks the tie?”  Good idea, but I was having enough fun swiping between two maps; adding a third would’ve put me in the ditch for sure. I mostly used Waze, but skipped the recommended routing through side streets in Gary, Indiana. The risk-reward trade-off on that just didn’t feel worth it.
    • I was supposed to head out to the Bay Area last week on business, going to a plant on the east side of the Bay for a big team meeting. But it got re-vectored at the last minute from California back to Chicago because that Bay Area country had reinstated indoor mask mandates. Nobody questioned the move. With everyone on the team fully vaccinated months ago, we’d all happily gotten used to meeting with each other like it’s 2019 again and really didn’t want to go back to 8 hours of masks, muffled voices, and trying to read non-verbal cues from the nose up. As it was, we just made it under the wire — our meeting was Wednesday and Thursday, and then on Friday, Chicago’s indoor mask mandate went into effect. It’s sorta peak Chicago that the city collected the revenue off of 385,000 mostly maskless Lollapalooza attendees before dropping the boom on those of us who actually live in the city.
    • Bridge Music — Astral Travel by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44282

    Following Up

    • One of the reasons it takes me so long to do an episode is I lack the discipline to bail out when I get caught in a click spiral. This time it was about the United Airlines flight that was evacuated because a teenager decided to troll fellow passengers by AirDropping them a picture of an Airsoft gun. For the non-iPhone users out there, AirDrop lets iPhones and Macs easily share stuff — pictures, videos, web links — wirelessly with others nearby. It’s been around for about 10 years and pretty quickly people figured out they could drop random/interesting pictures onto nearby strangers who had set their phones wide-open. I’ve seen this happen and it can be pretty funny, watching someone suddenly start looking around in a bar or a train, wondering who’d AirDropped them a picture. But what’s funny or, at worst, annoying in a bar is easily interpreted as a safety threat 10 years on from 9/11. They pulled everyone off for rescreening, searched the plane, and then left three hours later, leaving the teen behind in SFO. Understandable, I thought, if maybe a slight overreaction — until I got to maybe the 5th page of Google search results where I clicked through to not-yet- another rehash of the United incident, but something different — a story about an AirDropped message on a Delta flight. It said “A plane-jacking will happen soon, 2 hours and 37 minutes it will start in the front on aisle 6.” That flight too was evacuated, but this time they didn’t find the sender. Maybe airlines’ safety demos need to show iPhone users how to set their AirDrop to “Receiving Off”.
    • Irene and I continue to push on with plans for our first post-lockdown international trip, to Italy for a bike tour through Puglia. The whole Delta variant thing adds to the uncertainty. I talked in episode #175 about sorting through trip insurance and figuring out what credit card to use for the tour. Now booking hotels before and after the tour, we’re choosing to pay 10-15 euros more a night for cancellable rates, kind of a DIY trip insurance. Booking our flights into Bari, where the tour starts, I’ve also felt the need to be a bit more thoughtful. Airline schedules seem to be a bit more variable than usual. Last week, American sent me a note to let me know our November LHR-ORD flight has moved up 5:15pm to 10:35am. I understand that; air traffic is not following predictable patterns and they’re trying to keep up. For that direct flight home from London, it’s not a problem. But when we’re having to make a connection to a city with not-frequent service, it’s a different matter. The first thing I did was X out anything with more than 1 stop; it’ll be hard enough keeping 2 flights aligned let alone 3. Then I focused on the big European hubs — Heathrow, Frankfurt, DeGaulle — skipping connections at smaller places like Munich, Zurich. Finally, I look for connection times around 3 hours; what I thought would be a “Goldilocks” connection — not too short that any hiccup on the inbound flight would cause a problem, but not too long that we’d be having to sit in the airport all day wearing a mask or would have to track COVID protocols in yet another country because of an overnight connection. All that being said, we’re booked on Air France with a 2 hr, 50 minute connection in DeGaulle. But I don’t have any SkyTeam status, which causes me a bit of a worry — maybe we get caught in a long non-status security line. So I did some DIY trip insurance on the flight, burning an extra bit of my pile of American Express Membership miles for a ride in business class (cancellable, of course) to make up for my non-status status. You could say I’ve gone way down a rabbit hole overthinking this one and I wouldn’t really argue with you. But then again, it’s the first international trip in 2 years that I’ve been able to plan. So it’s kinda like an only child, getting way too much their parent’s attention. 
    • I was digging through my travel card wallet for my Global Entry card to find my Known Traveler number to put on the Air France reservation and came across a handful of Southwest drink coupons that are about to hit their expiration date. Southwest says expiring drink coupons are good through the end of this year. But Southwest suspended alcohol sales a few months back, and rightly so after a passenger assaulted a flight attendant, saying the booze won’t return until the federal mask mandate ends. But the TSA just extended that until January, past the coupons’ extended expiration date. And really, I don’t see the TSA letting up on in-flight masks anytime soon, so is Southwest going to be the first dry airline?
    • I mentor start-up founders at a tech incubator in Chicago. A few months ago, one of my sessions was with a bionic implant start-up. Implant the chip and the back of your hand becomes a contactless card; get into your office or pay at Starbucks with the tap of your hand. Another reminder, if a bit, say, unsettling (icky?), of the move to a cashless society. I talked about it back in episode #136 in 2017, about being maybe the last generation of cash payers, that my younger traveling colleagues rarely carried cash; they paid for everything with a card. And then, the pandemic massively accelerated it. Everything went contactless; nobody wanted to handle your cash. Last year, in episode #165, I noticed I had the same $200 of 20’s in my wallet in June that I’d taken out of an ATM right before the March lockdown. Last month in New York, the coffee joint across from our hotel was card-only and the same for the ice cream shop around the corner from our place in Chicago. Restaurants that use the Toast point-of-sale system print out a QR code at the bottom of your receipt, letting you pay and walk away. The country of Sweden thinks they’ll be completely cashless in 2 years. But I’m seeing a little reversion to the mean post-lockdown. I stopped off at a bar during a Saturday bike ride for a rehydration break. I asked the bartender if she took cash. “Yup,” she said, “Never stopped. It spends just like everything else.” It felt good to put a 20 on the bar, order beers, and see her take cash from the pile just like in 2019. It’s also that inflation is making it tougher for small places to eat the 2.5-3% card fees. The little Mexican place across the street from work where I’ll grab carne asada tacos for lunch now tacks on that fee for card users. They’re happy when I pull out cash, though last week I got 80 cents back in nickels. I guess the cashless thing has now caused a shortage of quarters. 
    • And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send ’em along to comments@travelcommons.com — you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons — or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.
    • Bridge Music — Emma by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50905 Ft: Martijn de Boer

    What Will Remain from These Pandemic Times?

    • In past episodes, I’ve been pretty skeptical about forecasts of permanent changes to the travel industry, or society in general, from  the pandemic. I have enough grey hair to remember commentators using the same “everything has changed” and “this is the new normal” language 13 years ago after the 2008 Great Recession, yet somehow we ended up back to maybe within 90% of  2007, the pre-recession starting point. Reversion to the mean is a strong force.
    • Unless it’s countered by a stronger force — like saving money — which is why I think the odds-on favorites for pandemic changes made permanent are what we’ve seen at hotels and restaurants. Checking into the Hilton in Midtown Manhattan last month, the front desk guy told us that they weren’t doing daily housekeeping; we could either schedule housekeeping now or call them when we wanted it. Pre-pandemic, Starwood and then Marriott would offer you points for skipping housekeeping — Go Green they called it. They pitched it as eco-friendly, but it really was all about saving labor costs. But the Hilton didn’t offer me any points. The week before, Hilton announced their new policy of on-request housekeeping across all of their brands; the first major chain to cement what had been an ad hoc pandemic response into a new chain-wide policy. The press release talked about “guest comfort”, but behind the PR flacks, it’s all about cost savings. I expect to see Marriott and others follow soon. I do have to give props to the housekeeping staff at that Hilton, though. When, after 3 days, I did call for a room cleaning, they were there in 5 minutes. 
    • A bigger loss for me is the breakfast buffet. My usual pre-pandemic routine was to work out and then take a quick pass through the concierge lounge for breakfast. Hotels must’ve found their ad hoc grab-n-go breakfast sacks cheaper because that too feels like it’s going to be the new normal. Way back in episode #113, in January 2015, I scoffed at a bartender in MSP who reached over to punch my food order into the iPad mounted in front of me. Now, we aim our own smartphones at QR codes and order our own meals — without any help — again, saving labor costs. 
    • Airlines started reverting to the mean at the end of last year when they dropped capacity restrictions and put butts in the middle seats again — just as traffic began to recover. If you haven’t been on a flight this year, you’d think nothing happened — well, except everyone wearing masks and the missing Bloody Mary eye openers on the morning Southwest flights to Vegas. Some folks are predicting the death of cancellation fees, but I don’t buy it. In 2019, United made $625 million in change and cancellation fees; ten of the largest U.S. carriers made $2.84 billion. That’s too big of a hole to leave unfilled. And they’re already creeping back in. Most Basic Economy seats are back to non-changeable/non-refundable. Maybe not this year, but if traffic holds up, I’d expect to see some airlines quietly not extend their fee waiver deadlines.
    • Private company behaviors are pretty straight-forward to forecast — just follow the money. It’s the government regs that are uncertain — how long do the mask mandates and COVID testing international entry rules stay around? Government rules only seem to ratchet up — it’s been 15 years since the TSA had us take our shoes off and dump our water bottles at security checkpoints and other than letting people bring on larger bottles of hand sanitizer, no one thinks the TSA is going to change those rules anytime soon. There’s no incentive.
    • Bridge Music — Melt Away by Kara Square (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/46605

    The Best Places I’ve Ate and Drank At In 2021… So Far

    • I talk a lot about food and beer in this podcast — as proven by the direct links to those categories in the top menu on the TravelCommons website. Back in episode #168 last fall, I said that, for me, food is one of the last hold-outs to global e-commerce and social media. 10-20 year ago, it was fun to go shopping and bring something unique back home. But now, there’s not much that you can’t find easier (and often cheaper) on Amazon or Taobao or Rakuten. And don’t even get me started on Instagram — if people aren’t in a 100-person queue to get their own personal shot of the Delicate Arch in Moab, UT then they’re queuing for made-for-Instagram-selfie murals like the WhatLiftsYou wings in Nashville’s Gulch neighborhood.  But food — you can post all the pictures you want of it, but you can’t post that sense memory of eating a dozen fresh oysters on a breakwater in Brittany, having a bowl of pho for breakfast in Saigon, or a 1am fresh-off-the-grill char polish that’s been dragged through the garden at a Chicago hot dog stand. 
    • And so, over the years, I’ve talked about restaurants, bars, taprooms that I’ve enjoyed and posted links to them on the website in show notes or in blog posts. But reading articles about the number of places that’ve closed since March 2020 — some say 10% of all restaurants in the US, almost 20% in Chicago — I figure it’ll take travel guide books and blogs a while to catch up with all the changes. It kinda hit me when a college friend pinged our group text for Nashville recommendations. I’ve been going there a couple of times a year for the past 5 years, but when I started going through my list of places, it struck me how many of them had closed. I had to re-curate my recommendations. I figured a good start on that would be to post a list of the best places I’ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels on the TravelCommons website.
    • Now, fair warning, this is a very idiosyncratic list; it’s the best places I ate and drank at in, say, New York City in May and July. The New York list is pretty Midtown/Murray Hill-centric because that’s where we were staying and that’s where Claire was looking for flats. I walked into Ted’s Corner Tavern because it’s around the corner from Claire’s new place; it made the list because it’s what I think a great neighborhood bar should be — good-sized bar with friendly bartenders who aren’t too busy to chat with you, the right volume level (lively, but not so loud that you have to shout across the table), and, of course, 30 taps and a well-curated beer list.
    • I’ve tried to make my list a well-curated one.  I don’t mention restaurants or taprooms that I thought were fine — the 3 or 3½-star places. It’s a list of places that stuck out in my mind for one reason or another, and would make me go out of my way to recommend them to, say, a college friend. This played out in a funny way on my Portland, Maine recommendations. I recommend Bob’s Clam Hut in Kittery for fried clams and Island Creek Oyster’s place in the East End/Munjoy Hill neighborhood for local oysters, but have no specific recommendation for a lobster roll place. It’s not for lack of trying; we had a lobster roll whenever we saw it on a menu, which wasn’t a cheap exercise since they were about $25 a pop. They were all good — we didn’t have a bad lobster roll anywhere. But after all that, there’s no one place I could point to and say “Go there for a lobster roll.”  I just say “Order one if you see it. It’ll probably be good no matter where you are”. 
    • Another oddity of the list — no Chicago places. Irene and I talked about this a bit. Between favorite places closing and cooking at home a lot more during the lockdowns and the strict mask mandate (which in Chicago was worded kinda like the airplane mandate — wear your mask at all times unless you were actively eating or drinking), we haven’t been anywhere that’s really stuck out. Well, except maybe for the Nancy’s Pizza a couple of blocks from the TravelCommons studios. They do a great pepperoni, spinach, and fresh tomato pan pizza. That’ll definitely make the list.
    • Because the list is a work-in-progress; I posted the first edition on the website last week with sections on Tucson, San Diego, Nashville, New York, and Portland. You’ll find a link in the episode description in your podcast app — if it supports HTML descriptions. I’ll be adding places through the rest of the year. There will be at least a couple of Chicago places (in addition to Nancy’s) on the list. I’m sure we’ll find some places in Puglia to add; and I’m positive I’ll find some UK taprooms that’ll make the cut since Rob Cheshire of This Week in Craft Beer has offered me a personal tour of his favorites.
    • When I’ve added a new section or think there’s enough new stuff to justify people taking a fresh look, I’ll put a new date on it so it goes back to the top of the Food and the Beer sections of the website, and I’ll post it on Facebook and Twitter. And if you end up hitting one of these places, shoot me a note and let me know if I got it right.

    Closing

    • Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
    • OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #178
    • I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
    • You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites — Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, and Amazon Music. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the YouTube channel.
    • If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.
    • If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler — send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, Instagram account,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website
    • Follow me on Twitter
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  • Podcast #165 — First Post Lockdown Flight; When Do We Travel For Business Again?

    Podcast #165 — First Post Lockdown Flight; When Do We Travel For Business Again?

    The hop taste isn’t coming through

    My first post-lockdown flight was a 90-minute Southwest non-stop from Chicago to Nashville. It wasn’t bad, but not as casually easy as my last pre-coronavirus flight in February. We talk about that experience as well as Hertz’s new cleaning program, my latest pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, and then wonder when business travel will return. All this and more at the direct link to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.

    Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #165:

    • Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
    • Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a couple of runs back down to Nashville for family stuff — one in the air and the other on the ground. And with COVID cases spiking in vacation spots like California and south Florida, it seems like that’s the market segment — folks traveling to see friends and family — that the airline and hotel companies are banking on. And that’s most of what I saw when flying back from Nashville a few Thursdays ago — lots of families with kids, groups of people meeting up on the other side of security for maybe some 4 day-weekend trips? The tip-off for me on the business vs. leisure traveler mix was the TSA lines — solid lines for regular TSA, while I pretty much walked straight through PreCheck. Another tip-off used to be mid-day lines at the bars, but with most of the airport restaurants closed up, that’s not a valid indicator right now.
    • Traveling right now requires a bit of nimbleness. On my first post-lockdown trip in May, the workout room at the Spring Hill Hampton Inn was open and I used it every day. Back down in June, there was a piece of paper taped to the door — “Closed by order of the Health Department”. The front desk agent told me it was a couple of days old — which explained all the banging in the room above me; somebody must’ve been doing their HIIT workout in their room. I didn’t know if I should be annoyed or impressed at how long they went at it. So for this last trip, I called the hotel the night before I left, before I packed my gym clothes vs. a yoga mat. They told me that they’d just reopened the workout room the day before, so the yoga mat went back in the closet. 
    • It’s kinda the same very fluid situation right now with bars and restaurants. A few days before we got to Nashville, the mayor closed down any establishment with less than 50% of their sales in food, so pretty much all the bars and taprooms. Makes sense, not arguing it; just forced us to quickly pivot some of our plans. It also forced us to go a bit “old school”, back to making actual phone calls, asking “are you open; dine-in or just take-away?” since places seem to be having trouble updating their websites and their Facebook/Yelp/Google/OpenTable listings fast enough to keep up with the changes.
    • It proved out our decision to book the Residence Inn rather than the mainline Marriott a few blocks away. The full-size fridge held a lot more beer, and that kitchenette came in handy when we found out that Prince’s Hot Chicken was only doing take-away — I can’t imagine trying to eat an extra-hot half-chicken perched on a king-size bed.
    • Bridge Music — Hula Hoop Party by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory

    Following Up

    • Lots has been written about how the COVID pandemic has massively accelerated changes toward contactless transactions. Microsoft’s CEO famously said back in April “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months”.  Back in episode #136, I said I felt like the last generation of cash payers, that my younger colleagues rarely carried cash; they paid for everything with a card. Looking into my wallet, I had the same $200 worth of 20’s in June that I’d taken out of an ATM in March. Nobody wants to handle cash; they don’t even want to handle my card (Most extreme experience – A bartender at Asgard Brewing’s taproom in Columbia, TN sprayed my Visa card with diluted chlorine bleach before swiping it to pay my bill. Made my wallet smell like a swimming pool). As much as possible, places want us to pre-order and pre-pay, so we just pick up our purchases in a socially distant way and then head home. It’s also switched up some opinions on using facial recognition for flight check ins. Pre-coronavirus, the push was from governments as a better way to do security screenings and to improve immigration compliance, and this was getting big pushback on privacy concerns. Now, it’s pivoted. The push is from travel companies using facial recognition as a way of providing the touchless check-in experience that most travelers now want. 
    • But facial recognition is stymied by face masks which we wear when we’re checking in at airports and hotel lobbies. As is Face ID when trying to unlock my iPhone to get to my boarding pass or digital room key. Until I can downgrade to an iPhone SE with that old-school Touch ID that unlocks using my thumb print, I think I’m going to have to shorten the PIN code on my iPhone 11 Pro. I lengthened it for better security but am banging it in more and more often. And I’ve noticed the iPhone is really slow about recognizing my number presses — or it misses some when I go too fast (like when I’m trying to pull up a boarding pass in line) and errors out. 
    • Walking down the Hertz Five Star aisle at Nashville Airport, I saw their version of paper rings that hotels used to put around toilet seats to “certify” they’d been cleaned. In Hertz’s case, they put a “Hertz Gold Standard Clean” sticker across the driver-side center pillar (the B pillar for all my gearhead listeners) so that you break it when you open the driver door to get it. Nice gesture, though it kept me from doing my usual walk down the aisle, opening the door of a bunch of cars to check their mileage. Seemed rude to break all those stickers, though I did notice more than a few broken ones when choosing my car. Way back in the old days of TravelCommons, we used to talk about the TSA doing “security theater” in the screening lines. This feels a bit like “sanitation theater”. 
    • I finally broke down and bought a new set of Bose noise cancelling headphones — the new 700’s. This is my third set of Bose cans. Bought my first pair in 2009. I was flying a lot of short flights at the time, and in those days before regional jets, I was on a lot of prop planes. And they’re noisy — not just on take-off, but the entire flight. After a while, I started to notice fatigue when getting off those planes. Talking to a few folks, they said the noise heightens stress. A friend told me how much he liked his Bose cans, and so I burnt some Amex Membership Rewards points on Amazon for a pair of Quiet Comfort 2’s. It was a revelation; flick the switch and, whoosh, quiet. I took them on every flight, until 3 years later, I left them in a seatback pocket when rushing off a plane to make a tight connection. I immediately lit up some more Membership Rewards points for a new pair – QC-15’s. Four years later, I replaced a worn out set of ear cushions. And though the non-replaceable headband cushion is looking pretty ratty, the now 8-year-old headphones still work great. What got me to replace them was the wire. I’d be sitting in my usual aisle seat, plugged into my iPhone (using one of those dongles that Apple no longer gives you with a new phone). At some point in the flight, the folks in the middle and window seats would want to get up and use the toilet and inevitably, I’d snag the wire on the arm of the seat, pull the headphones off my head, and/or launch my phone a row forward.  I could’ve gotten a pair of the QC-35’s — same form factor without the wire — but decided to go all next-generation with the 700’s, which has meant some adjustment pains. Like there are buttons in places where they never were before. So when I grab the ear cups to slip the headphones off, I manage to hit a button that changes the noise reduction level or summons Siri. Also new is using the touch surface on the right ear cup to control things. You tap or swipe the right ear cup to accept or drop a call, pause a song, raise or lower the volume, or skip 30 seconds to fast-forward past a podcast ad. I’m learning to be a bit more precise in my motions; I’ve already dropped a couple of calls when I was just trying to turn down the call volume.  One thing I really like — more for working-at-home than in-flight usage — is that the 700’s can pair with two Bluetooth devices at the same time. So, for me, I have them paired with my MacBook Air and my iPhone and they switch seamlessly between the two. Nice when I’ve got Zoom calls on my Mac and then a phone call on my iPhone. And, call me shallow, but they look a bit cooler than my old QC-15’s. I’ve had the 700’s for about a month now and really like them. I guess you could say they’re “TravelCommons Approved.
    • And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send ’em along — text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com — you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons — or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.
    • Bridge Music — i knew by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: shannonsongs

    First Post-Lockdown Flight

    • Way back at the beginning of the lockdown, the first Saturday of April, I was on a Zoom beer drinking call with Rob Cheshire, a long-time TravelCommons listener and now a podcaster — he interviews UK craft brewers on his This Week in Craft Beer. It was a Saturday afternoon call, for Rob and the other guys in London; just past noon for me in Chicago, but hey…. And somewhere around our second or third beer, Rob asked me “When will you be comfortable getting on a plane again?” I really didn’t have a good answer. It was early days; I wasn’t sure.
    • Fast forward to the back half of June. I needed to get down to Nashville again and didn’t have the time to burn 8 hrs for the drive down and another 8 on the way back. I had some travel funds sitting in my Southwest account from a couple of April trip cancellations, and Southwest flies 6 non-stop 737s between Chicago and Nashville while American and United only do smaller regional jets, and Southwest isn’t packing them full — booking those bigger planes at ⅔’s capacity — while American and United say they’ll let you know if your flight books solid. All told, a pretty easy decision to fly Southwest. One of the benefits of living in Chicago, a rare 3-hub town.
    • The day before my flight, when getting my boarding pass on the Southwest app (my usual process; I was contactless before it was a thing), I had to click through a certification that I wasn’t running a temperature and that I hadn’t been exposed to or tested positive for COVID-19. OK, click. Then I get a screen telling me that face masks are required to board. Makes sense, click. And now I get my boarding pass.
    • Monday morning, Irene drops me off at a pretty sedate departures curb at Midway. I mask up and walk in. It’s not empty, but it’s definitely not the normal Monday morning bustle. It feels more like a Wednesday early afternoon. There’s a bit of a line at regular security, but no line at PreCheck. The TSA agent asks me to drop my mask for a moment to check my ID and then waves me through. I noticed that TSA still has their October 2020 Real ID deadline warning signs on the podium. Hmm… I remember reading at the end of March that the TSA has pushed the deadline a year to October 2021. Guess they haven’t had a chance to issue updated signs. You’d think they’d just take the old ones down.
    • Most of the restaurants and stores were closed; a pretty common situation. Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and Amtrak travel blogger, replied to one of my Twitter posts saying “I flew Southwest a few weeks ago. Layovers are rough because most places in the airports are closed. I was at STL and only found beer at Burger King and Dunkin Doughnuts.” I would’ve been happy for just a coffee. Down in the main Southwest concourse, some gates were closed off with curtains which I assume was to keep people from sitting there so they don’t have to clean it.
    • Looking around the terminal, it felt like mask usage was about 80%. Just about everyone was wearing them when walking around. I’d see some people not wearing them while sitting at the gate, though those folks were distancing themselves from everyone else. I’d see kids ripping their masks off as soon as they got off the jetway. I did notice, though, a sizable minority of mask wearers were just covering their mouths, leaving their noses uncovered — pilots, cleaning crew, passengers, wheelchair people. Now I’m no epidemiologist, but that seems to defeat the purpose.
    • When the agent called boarding, she said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row, and please, don’t everyone sit up front. We need a bit of weight distribution.” It was a quick boarding; we pushed back and took off early. These truly are unprecedented times.
    • Nashville was more crowded on Thursday morning when I headed back home. Mostly families as I said at the top of the show. The end of the concourse where the  Southwest gates are was as crowded as usual. There were signs around saying that 3 seats between people equals 6 ft, but there were too many people waiting to make it practical; at least everyone is masked up. I walked back up the terminal to find a bit more space and there, tucked away behind some construction sheeting, I found an empty gate. I’m all alone, mega social distanced, so I take off my mask, log into the WiFi and do some work until the Southwest app on my phone bings, telling me that boarding has begun. 
    • There were a lot more than 40 people on this flight. I found an empty row and slid all the way over to the window seat since it’s only a 90-minute flight. About 3 minutes later, a guy sat down in the aisle seat. Nobody in the middle seat. Everyone wearing masks and nobody’s head right next to mine, I was good to go. Maybe helped just a bit by the fact that, in those 3 minutes, I pointed all three air jets toward the empty middle seat and turned them on full blast, creating an air curtain between me and the aisle seat — just in case.
    • Bridge Music — Misunderstood by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Alchemistry

    When Does Business Travel Come Back?

    • My son Andrew and his girlfriend took the 6am flight to LGA earlier this week. I asked him “How full was the flight?” “Maybe 20 people; mostly families,” he said. Didn’t surprise me that a Thursday 6am LGA flight was only at 11% capacity. That’s normally a business travel run; people getting up at 0 dark 30 in Chicago to make 10am meetings in Manhattan. But there’s not many business travelers now.  While business travelers only make up about 10% of passengers on major airlines, they provide between 55 and 75% of the profits. You might could think they’re subsidizing the budget fares those families are using.
    • Over the past month, I’ve been talking with Sales VPs at companies that deliver complex IT services. If anybody would be feeling the bite of not traveling, I thought it would be these guys. I’ve done a number of these deals, and they always involved locking all the right decision makers in a conference room to hash out all the contract details and ride herd over the transition. But I was completely wrong. They all said that work hasn’t slowed down during the lockdown. They’ve been able to do all that conference room work over Zoom. Indeed, they said being virtual has made it easier for them. Pre-lockdown, one of their biggest challenges was calendar wrangling — being able to get all their execs and the client execs into that conference room at the same time. Now, they just click some buttons and everyone shows up in Zoom gallery mode — no travel planning, no scrambling after cancelled or delayed flights. They all said they love the ease of virtual meetings and, at the end of the day, closing the lid on their laptops and having dinner with the family every night.
    • Kinda supports the narrative that business travel will never rebound; back to the Microsoft CEO’s quote: in 2 months, we’ve advanced 2 years in virtual work culture. But when I probed a bit, I found that Zoom hasn’t completely replaced an airplane ticket. While these guys have been able to virtually close deals they had in their sales funnel, virtual meetings don’t seem to be replacing these deals; getting new prospects into the top of the sales funnel. So while things are looking good now, they’re beginning to worry about 4-6 months from now.
    • This was the exact opposite of what I’d expected. I thought the give and take of negotiations, the sidebar conversations, the emotional content, wouldn’t translate into video calls. But it looks like I was wrong; that once a deal has some momentum and a structure to guide everyone, the in-person hammering out turns out to be a nice-to-have. And the reason new opportunities aren’t coming in is that they need more exploratory, abstract, wide-ranging conversations that lack that guiding structure and selling a team as much as a product — at least for complex services — and that’s tough to do over a pane of glass.
    • And so they all said that they’d probably start traveling again — reluctantly — by the end of this month. But I do think this, call it a 4-month exercise in figuring out virtual work methods and cultures will move the set point, everybody’s default decision toward virtual meetings. And so maybe a bit less focused on high-profit road warriors and more dependent on those cost-conscious families. Does this mean repointing the 6am LGA flights to Cancun? They’re going to have to seriously reengineer those drink carts.

    Closing

    • Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
    • OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #165
    • I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
    • Find TravelCommons on Stitcher, SoundCloud, TuneIn, iTunes, and Spotify The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe.
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    • If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites.
    • If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler — send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, Instagram account,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website
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    • Direct link to the show
  • Podcast #148 — Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex

    Podcast #148 — Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex

    Tough travel day when the deicing fluid freezes

    Flying home into the teeth of the polar vortex that gave Chicago its coldest day since January 1985 took a bit of flight changing strategy and some incredibly dedicated United ramp workers. I get on-trend by “Kondo-ing” my old suitcases, worry about visiting Sweden as it rapidly goes cashless, and gather up some odds-‘n’-ends from travel notebook into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”. All this and more at the direct link to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.

    Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #148:

    • Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
    • Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, just trying to survive Nature’s mood swings — 16 straight days of snow, the much publicized polar vortex cold last week followed by a four-day 73 degree temp rise — from -22 on early Thursday morning (actual temperature; none of this wind chill guesstimating) to +51 degrees Monday afternoon, and then a 40-some degree drop back to the single digits by Friday. It’s climate change, alright. Just not all in the same direction. Last Wednesday was the second coldest day in Chicago history at -23 degrees. I was also here for the coldest day — January 20, 1985 — when it hit -27 degrees. I was just starting my last quarter at University of Chicago. It left an impression. After that, I didn’t interview with any Chicago companies. I took a job in Dallas and moved down in July — to temperatures averaging in the 90’s. Brilliant
    • I missed the wind-up to last week’s freeze fest. I flew out to New York on the Monday morning at the tail end of that 16-day snow fest. I had booked a Southwest flight from Chicago Midway to LaGuardia because Southwest now flies into the new renovated concourse in the otherwise Third World-ish Terminal B and, being that kind of travel geek, I wanted to check it out. Southwest had other plans though. Sunday late morning, about 18 hours before departure, Southwest emailed me that they were cancelling the flight. I was surprised at their proactivity, but it was a good thing, I guess, ‘cause it gave me time to move to United — no new terminal experience, but a lot better flight frequency.
    • Which turned out to be key on Wednesday, trying to fly home on that -23 degree day. Tuesday afternoon, I moved my flight home up from 3pm to 12 noon. I figured all the flights would be delayed and the later my flight, the worse the delay and the higher probability of cancellation. Looking at United’s flights, the 11am and 1pm flights were regional jets; the noon flight was a mainline Airbus. ORD was going to have to cut capacity on Weds — the ground crews could only be outside for short stretches, especially the guys on the deicing trucks. I figured they’d cancel the smaller regional jets first, which meant they’d move the folks from the 11am and 1pm flights onto the noon flight, meaning that flight might be delayed, but United wouldn’t want to cancel it.
    • And the next day, that’s pretty much how it played out. When I got to LaGuardia, those 11 and 1 flights were already cancelled. The noon flight still showed on-time, but checking the United and FlightAware apps, I could see that the Airbus was still in Chicago. That noon departure time was meaningless until that plane was in the air. I set up in the Amex Centurion Lounge, doing calls and emails, refreshing those apps every 10 minutes. The Airbus’ 8am departure time came and went, as did 9am, and 10am. It finally left around 10:40am Chicago time. I had lunch and a beer in the lounge — the food in those Centurion lounges is good… and free — and headed down for the gate. Walking down the concourse, I passed a Uniqlo vending machine selling “ultra light” down jackets for $70. (Amazing what they sell in airport vending machines) I thought for a moment about buying one to layer up when walking up the jet bridge in O’Hare. Given the extreme conditions, it was the most understandable 2½-hr delay I’ve ever had on United. I was incredibly grateful for the United ramp workers who were outside that day. I was happy to just get home that afternoon. Leaving the LGA Amex lounge for my gate, I ran into a Chicago colleague. He had 4 flights canceled on him already and, as I found out the next morning, didn’t get home until Thursday — after going through Richmond. Good thing for him the Amex Lounge drinks are free too
    • Bridge Music — Emily and the Djembe by mghicks (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. Ft: Emily via Briareus

    Following Up

    • As promised, I expanded the Santa Fe topic in December’s episode to a full 1,800-word post on the website — which might help explain why this episode slipped from the end of January to the beginning of February. The Reader’s Digest condensed version (my obligatory Baby Boomer cultural reference) goes something like this — Friday: hike, drink beer, eat a green chile cheeseburger; Saturday: hike, drink beer, eat a green chile cheeseburger, then drink margaritas and eat local New Mexican dishes; Sunday: wake up a little later, walk rather than hike, eat tamales from a cart. I liked Steve Frick’s comment “When Road Warriors relax” on his retweet. I did try to write this a bit more like a travel article than a blog post — more of a story than a sequential list of the places we went. But I did make sure to include links to all the good places we hit. If you haven’t already, give it a read and let me know your thoughts.
    • When I was going through ORD in January, during the partial government shutdown, I thanked the TSA screeners for showing up even though they weren’t getting paid. If I’m reading the GSA salary band schedule correctly, the typical TSA screener makes between 29 and 44 grand a year. They could’ve called in sick to drive an Uber to make up for the missed paychecks, but they didn’t — as opposed to Atlanta where I stood in some long PreCheck lines because of sick outs. Not that I blame the Atlanta TSA folks, but it made me appreciate the ORD TSA people even more.
    • Right at about a year ago, I broke down and bought a new Victorinox suitcase. I had beat a grey Samsonite into submission after 2½ years of trundling across New Orleans sidewalks. My well-traveled Swiss Army roller became unusable when its retractable handle stuck in the extended position. And then my Bluesmart smart bag was banned from by airlines because its battery wouldn’t eject. A couple of weeks ago, my wife called me upstairs. “We’ve got to declutter this attic. You need to Kondo-ize your suitcases,” she said. Wha…? She pointed over to where I’d stashed the Samsonite, the Swiss Army roller, and the Bluesmart. “You should only keep the suitcases that spark joy,” she said. Again, wha…? How does a broken suitcase spark joy? “Exactly!” she said. I pulled the old luggage tags off and threw them in the garbage can before she forced me to binge watch that Netflix series.
    • Over a year ago, way back in episode #136 in December 2017, I talked about feeling like I’m the last generation of cash payers. My younger colleagues — and my children — not only do they pay for everything with a card, many of them don’t even carry cash. It’s happening even faster in Sweden, where 95% of purchases by Millenials is electronic; to the point that half the country’s retailers think they’ll stop taking cash in 5-6 years. So I got a chuckle when long-time TravelCommons listener Allan Marko sent along this notice that he picked up while touring Laos last month –
      • “Please note that only new crisp notes are accepted in Laos. US$100 notes receiving a better exchange rate; US$ notes of the series number before 1996 as well as US$100 notes with the series number CB, dirty and/or damaged notes, or notes with any writing on it are not accepted in Laos. Please bring some small changes with you for your convenience.”
      • Cash is king in Laos — but only if it’s neat, tidy, and young
    • Heading to LGA last Weds morning, traffic was bad in Manhattan and so the wait times for Uber and Lyft were a bit silly. So instead, I let the hotel doorman guide me over to a black car. I saw the driver tip him $10, but I didn’t care — it was a nice clean car — a Lexus hybrid — and the driver knew the back ways to LGA, so we didn’t get jammed up on the highway. Everything was good — until we parked outside of Terminal B. I had asked the doorman before getting in — “Does he take a credit card?” “Oh yeah,” he said. And to give the driver credit, he tried to take my Amex, but for some reason his iPhone couldn’t get data at Terminal B Departures, which meant he couldn’t connect to Square, which meant he couldn’t take my card. After trying for 5 minutes, he went palms up. Lucky for him, I am a cash carrier and I had just enough to pay the fare. His tip? He’ll have to take that up with his mobile carrier.
    • We were working on our Spring Break vacation a few weeks back — we’re going to Brittany France at the end of March because, well, who needs sun and sand when you enjoy rain blowing in off the Atlantic? — and the flights from Chicago to Paris were looking just ugly. So we started opening up the search filters a bit, looking at some extended layovers and overnight stays. If done right, it can be fun. Back in episode #130 (I seem to be digging deep into the archives on this episode), I talked about how my son Andrew and I skipped a reasonable 90-minute connection in Vienna airport for full-day 8-hr one; dropped our bags in held luggage and then hopped a cab to the city center for a beer-and-schnitzel crawl. On the way over to Paris, SAS showed an 8-hr layover in Stockholm. Hmmm… we hadn’t been there since 2006 when we went to Sweden to pick up my Saab convertible. But I remember Arlanda airport being a long haul from Stockholm. Would it take too long getting to and from Stockholm? Thankfully, no. It’s a 20-minute train ride, and the Arlanda Express runs every 15 minutes. So, we’re gearing up for this time for a beer-and-herring crawl thanks to a Stockholm Craft Beer Bar custom Google Map from TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend Rob Cheshire. Though this whole cashless Sweden thing has me a bit worried. I read that more than 4,000 Swedes have implanted microchips in their hands to let them pay for things with just a wave. I’m hoping that I don’t have to have surgery to order a beer.
    • On the way back, again, the direct flights, or even the 1-stops from Paris to the US were priced high, both in dollars and in points, and not having anything critical on the books for the Monday of our return, we looked at some overnight stays. We decided to skip London; our time in Brittany will span Brexit Day and so we thought, why risk it? The other overnight options that popped up were Frankfurt and… Vienna. I was in Frankfurt last summer, and while I’d done that Vienna layover 2 years ago, Irene hasn’t been in Vienna since 1992, and then, only in the train station making a connection to Budapest. So we bookend our Brittany vacation with a micro-vacations in Sweden and Austria, and save a little money in air fare — which, to be honest, we’ll probably spend and then some in food and beer.
    • Which would be better than taking up United on their offer to buy up from Premiere Gold to Premiere Platinum for $2,000. Not to say there aren’t some benefits from that jump — jump one level up on the upgrade list, a little better bonus miles multiplier, though I don’t ever use my current 2-free-bag allotment, so bumping up to 3 doesn’t do me much. And now that Gold has been moved up to Boarding Group 1, it doesn’t give me a better shot at overhead space. I’ve said it before in previous episodes, I don’t think the incremental benefit from higher status is worth flying weird itineraries or inconvenient times. And it’s certainly not worth 2 grand.
    • And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com — you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons — or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.
    • Bridge music — Dreaming by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.

    Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex

    • Doing a little start-of-the-year cleaning of my travel notebook. I always carry a 3½ x 5½ in notebook with me to jot down notes and thoughts. My current notebook is a stiff rather than a hard back so I don’t break it when I put it in the back pocket of my jeans, and has fountain-pen friendly Clairefontaine paper because, as I said in the last episode, it’s not like a lack for things to be fiddly about. This notebook has a couple of pages of letters and numbers written with different pens and inks, a few pages of Madrid beer bars with the ones we hit X’d, a half-dozen pages of really bad algebra when I was trying to help my daughter with a math test, and then the rest is bullet pointed blurbs, thoughts, observations that are the seed corn for the podcast.
    • Sometimes, though, there’s just not enough in one of those thoughts to grow it into an episode topic, not enough to get it beyond the 10-20 words that are already there. So, for lack of coming up with anything better, here’s a bit of a ramble through those stunted seed corns. Yeah, I’m selling this pretty well. I can hear you all reaching for the Skip button already.
    • Like, last fall when I was posing for my umpteenth identity badge at a new client, I thought I was given the camera a slight smile — like a passport photo smile, not showing teeth but a pleasant look. The security guard turned the camera around — it was deadpan neutral. If I hadn’t tried to smile, I would’ve been frowning. I reminded me to consciously make an effort to smile with folks like gate agents and TSA screeners because, as I get older, I must get more of a grumpy resting face. Which may explain some of the reaction I get from flight attendants.
    • One thought that almost made it out of the notebook — Hotels need to stop feeling the need to innovate in the bathroom. I remember writing this in the midst of a 4-day/3-hotel run where the taps and shower control in every hotel were different. I’m OK with innovating some parts of the room — like dropping in some cool new coffee maker, or an interesting radio or TV, or even a weird chair — but that’s gotta stop at the bathroom door. When I cross that threshold, I’m usually not completely awake, I’m often not wearing my glasses so can’t see real well if, indeed, I’ve actually turned on the light. And when I step in the shower, I’m definitely not wearing glasses, so small print instructions don’t go down well. I thought hotel showers had pretty much standardized on the single knob that turned on at Cold and got Hotter as you turned it clockwise, all the time delivering the same volume of water. But sometimes you move that knob back and forth to no effect, and you eventually figure out that you have to pull it to turn it on.  The worst, though, are the controls that go in the wrong direction — maybe counterclockwise, or push instead of pull. After I finally figure it out, I can understand what they were trying to do, and it might then make sense, but if it takes me more than 30 seconds to get my morning shower going, someone has failed — and I don’t think it’s me.
    • A year or so ago, when I was stuck for a half hour on a broken light rail train between the Atlanta terminals and the rental car center, I started wondering why the push for these trains; what’s the business case? ORD has shut down its train, the ATS, Airport Transit System, to modernize it and extend it to a new rental car center. The price? $800 million. PHX is spending $700 million to extend their SkyTrain to their rental car center. Tampa’s SkyConnect train that went in service last year cost over $400 million. And don’t get me started on Newark’s AirTrain. I mean, I get the need to cut down on diesel emissions from the rental buses, but it seems these airports could buy a whole lot of electric buses for less than that what their spending on a couple of miles of light rail. And when those trains break down, there’s no option but to wait — no other train can pull up beside yours and take everyone onward. You’re stuck until they figure it out.
    • Well, we’ve cleaned out the Travel Potpourri category, Alex. Let’s move on to Extreme Weather Delays for $200.

    Closing

    • Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
    • OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #148
    • I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
    • Find TravelCommons on Stitcher, SoundCloud, TuneIn, iTunes, and now on Spotify
    • If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler — send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, Instagram account,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website
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