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  • Podcast #185 — Notes on Louisville; Changing Mask Mandates

    Podcast #185 — Notes on Louisville; Changing Mask Mandates

    Skeleton in Louisville taproom
    Having Fun in Louisville!

    As the great American philosopher Ferris Bueller once said, “Life moves pretty fast” and in this episode, we talk about the rapid changes in hotel service, and in-flight mask mandates. Then I go into detail about our recent trip to Louisville, complete with recommendations for food and drink. 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 #185:

    Since The Last Episode

    • Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
    • Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois a couple of weeks after hanging out in Brooklyn for what maybe I should call a longer weekend — Thursday to Tuesday — rather than a long weekend, which traditionally was the 3 days, Friday to Sunday, when I was growing up, but now with telecommuting feels like it’s gone to 3½ – 4, Thursday noon to Sunday. 
    • I always have stayed in Manhattan on my trips to New York, so I decided to change it up this time. Rather than run the usual play — cycling through corporate codes on hotel websites to find something reasonable in midtown Manhattan — we posted up at an Airbnb in the Cobble Hill neighborhood in Brooklyn. And instead of threading through crowds on Madison Avenue to find a quick bite, we wandered down the much emptier sidewalks, maybe dodging a work-from-home dad following his daughter on a bike, and walked into a local butcher shop, G Esposito & Sons, to get a couple of sandwiches. Which turned into a 10-minute conversation with the owner — not sure if it was G himself or one of the Esposito sons — about his wife’s favorite sandwich, how he screwed up his Ash Wednesday fast right at breakfast, and pointing in the case to the sausage his wife was making sausage for dinner that night. Definitely a change from my usual Midtown lunch experiences.
    • And that’s kinda what I wanted to get with this stay, the chance to dig into Brooklyn a bit by staying there; walking the neighborhoods; trying places like Esposito’s and Caputo’s Bakery just down Court St where we grabbed bread and pastries; places you probably wouldn’t journey to, but places you’d absolutely duck into if you were walking by. I used to do this when I’d do every-week trips to San Francisco or New Orleans. I wouldn’t stay in the same place every week. Instead, I’d move around. In San Francisco, I’d stay on Nob Hill one week, maybe SoMa the next week, and then maybe down the 101 in San Mateo for a change of scenery… and restaurants. I wouldn’t come out of it an expert in the city, but I’d come away with a lot more experiences, more of a feel of the city than if I’d stayed in the same place for 6 or 8 weeks straight.
    • And that’s what we got out of this weekend, a little better feel for Brooklyn. And part of that feel I picked up pretty quick — cash is still king in Brooklyn, at least in Cobble Hill. These old-school Italian places — cash only, though they do make space in the back of the shop for an ATM, just in case you find yourself a little short.
    • Bridge Music — SP*ANK Vox by Loveshadow (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219

    Following Up

    • Following up on my recent rants about US hotel housekeeping cutbacks, Jim McDonough hit me up on Twitter with his most recent experience
      • “We stayed at the Whaler on Kaanapali Beach on Maui late January/early February. The deal was “room cleaned on checkout”. However, we noticed the trash was being emptied (or someone was stealing it) while we were out. Apparently, the Monday after our arrival, they had resumed daily cleaning — but forgot to tell us.”
    • Jim, thanks for that. You’d think they’d want to take credit for the service upgrade — or at least prevent you thinking someone was breaking into your room
    • Long-time friend, long-time listener, first-time caller Laura Wotycha texted me about her recent experience with travel inflation
      • “Having found myself with 3 unexpected days off from work, I decided to head south for some sun and a Vitamin D top-up at my favorite, favorite, favorite resort, the outstanding JW Marriott Grande Lakes in Orlando. I’m all about the most beautiful (grown-up) lazy river and handsome pool boys who come right over when you flip your flag up on your lounge chair. But the number was huge — twice the decent sized number I paid last May for my birthday weekend.
      • “So instead, I headed a bit east, to the Eastern Shore of Maryland to a much more reasonably priced Hyatt resort in Cambridge, MD. It was freaking ridiculously beautiful! Saved money on the flight as well as on the room, some of which I promptly dropped on multiple platters of Chesapeake Bay oysters.”
    • Laura, I’m glad it all worked out for you. The Eastern Shore is its own world, and a fun place to explore before the summer crowds hit. I understand the attraction of flipping up the flag for an instant cocktail in the Florida sun, but I’ll take those oysters with a cold beer every time.
    • In the last episode, I said “No one sees an end in site for in-flight masking”. And 2 weeks later, the UK ditches its remaining COVID travel restrictions. Heathrow airport then drops mandatory masking; UK-based airlines BA, Virgin Atlantic, Tui, and EasyJet drop mask rules where they can — mostly within the UK (except for Scotland), and to Denmark, Iceland, Gibraltar, Hungary, and the Caribbean. Then KLM announces they’ll stop enforcing in-flight masking even though it’s still a legal Dutch requirement. And now this week, US airline CEOs and  Southwest Airlines’ flight attendants’ union are calling for the end of the US mask mandate. In the words of the great American philosopher Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast”

      The US CEOs have said this before. The Southwest flight attendants are a new voice, and they have a point. The mask mandate impacts them more than anyone day-in, day-out —  they’re the ones having to enforce it and, let’s face it, that wasn’t in the job description when they took the job. Indeed, a Tui flight attendant tweeted out “First flight done without a mask and it was an absolute dream .. Happy passengers .. Happy crew”  The March extension of the US mandate was only a month — from March 18 to April 18 — the shortest extension I can recall. Right now, the CDC is supposed to be working on a “revised policy framework” for mask mandates on public transport. In spite of being a lousy forecaster, I’m guessing that they’ll take every bit of that month before they make an announcement.

      Irene and I were talking about this yesterday. Even without a mandate, we’ll probably voluntarily pull out a KN-95 on a completely packed plane in the winter; when I’m sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with a guy coughing or sniffling. It’s less of a COVID thing and more of a “I should’ve been doing this for the last 30 years” thing. Would’ve saved a fortune on cough and cold medicine and pocket packs of Kleenex.
    • At the end of the last episode, I mentioned looking forward to checking out the new LGA Amex Centurion Club. The old LGA club was upstairs, tucked in a corner and, worst of all, before security, so next to the bar, they had a TV showing the live feed from a camera pointed at the TSA checkpoint so you could figure out when you needed to leave the lounge to make your flight. The new club, in the new Terminal B, is great — properly placed after security, on the way to the gates, and twice as big as the old lounge, so plenty of room even when there’s a weather delay.  The one kink in my plan was — I’d forgotten to bring my Amex Platinum card to New York. Ugh. So the night before leaving, I hit the Amex website, fire up the chat box and ask “Is there any way to get in without my physical card?” The net net of the back-and-forth was “No” — as I expected. Ugh, again. But then, on the Uber ride to the airport, I was killing time, poking around the Amex app on my iPhone and found a screen on the LGA Centurion Lounge. And there, under Access Information, it said I could use a Platinum card or a Check-In Code. So I hit the button for a Check-In Code and got a QR code from Loungebuddy. Hmmm. Well, nothing to lose, so after security, I walked up to the desk, the agent scanned the QR code and my boarding pass and I was good to go. “Everyone’s using it now,” she told me. I went to the bar and got a free beer thinking “Somebody should tell the chat guys 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 or the Instagram account at travelcommons — or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.
    • Bridge Music — Lakeside Jam by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998

    Notes on Louisville

    • Sticking my head into the open hatch of the fermentation vessel during the Angel’s Envy distillery tour was probably my peak Louisville moment — looking down at the bubbling mash, and then inhaling — enjoying those nice yeasty notes for just second or two until the hot CO2 coming up from those bubbles burnt out my nostrils.
    • I’m not a big bourbon guy; more of a Scotch guy, but it still was a great tour. I like these kinds of tours; ones where you see people making things. It was a Friday afternoon and the place running at full tilt — the mash tuns and the fermenters were full, the distilling column was burbling away, a couple of guys were emptying aged bourbon out of barrels giving that room a really nice smell, and the bottling line was running at a surprisingly not-hectic pace, the filled bottles proceeding along the conveyor at a kinda stately pace past a couple of inspectors and then to the boxing crew. And there were only 7 of us on the tour, so we all got front-row views. The tasting at the end of the tour was well-done; a 15-20-minute guided tasting session rather than the “here’s your complimentary shot” I usually get at Scottish distilleries.
    • I mentioned in the last episode that I have a small bit of history with Louisville. My folks moved there from Memphis in the early ‘80’s while I was in college in DC. And I ended up living one summer when I was too broke to stay in DC. And where I learned to pronounce Louisville like a native — “Lou-a-vul”, not moving your mouth, swallowing all the vowels. Which is how you know someone pronouncing it “Louisville” is not from there. I only ever heard one person pronounce it “Louis-ville”. He was English, so I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. But after my family moved to Southern California in the late ‘80’s, that was pretty much it until July 2012 when Louisville was the first stop on my 2,100-mile drive around the South that I talked about in episode #100. And then 10 years later, this trip.
    • Back in 2012, after 6 hours of I-65, I took the first exit I could after crossing the Ohio River and parked myself at the counter of Garage Bar, a repurposed gas station in NuLu — New Louisville — the hip neighborhood developing east of downtown, running a few blocks down East Market Street. Ten years later, Garage Bar is still there and NuLu has expanded east and north, starting to smear into what was called Butchertown when my folks lived there. There seems to be a coffee shop or taproom on every corner and cool independent boutiques and restaurants filling the spaces in-between. It’s a fun neighborhood with a buzz about it — people on the sidewalks, every coffee shop and restaurant I walked into were doing good business. I talked about La Bodeguita De Mima in the last episode, a great Cuban restaurant that was jammed on Thursday night. Saturday morning, we tried to carb up at Biscuit Belly, but it was packed, so we walked up a block to Butchertown Grocery Bakery for my biscuit & gravy fix. 
    • Working our way through the Butchertown neighborhood toward the river, we had to navigate our way under a huge set of elevated expressway lanes — a  tangle of I-64 and I-71 — to get to the Ohio River. The Ohio River, like the Mississippi and the Missouri and the Cumberland, is a working river, carrying barge tows 5 football fields long, making it a bit dodgy for small pleasure craft, and so the banks of these rivers are often pretty industrial. But Louisville’s Waterfront Park reclaimed some of that industrial space, scrap yards and sand pits, to provide a nice stretch of riverside recreation. The one bit of industrial scrap they did leave — the late 1800’s Big Four railroad bridge, decommissioned in 1969, left standing above the river without connections to either side… until about 8 years ago when Kentucky and Indiana built ramps to reconnect it to the river banks on each side and now it’s a pedestrian and biking path.  
    • We drove over to the Shelby Park neighborhood, parked the car and walked along Logan Street. We started at the Logan St Market, shopping the food stalls on the first floor and then browsing through a makers’ market on the second floor. We walked down Logan Street, past a butterfly farm, a ping pong emporium, a hot dog joint and a bunch of houses ‘til we got to Atrium Brewing which had some great beers, a nice taproom, and a big TV showing college basketball because, what else would be on in Kentucky. It was a nice walk. We could feel this stretch was beginning to develop, but I don’t think it’ll be another NuLu. Feels like it’ll be something more neighborhoody, lower key, maybe a touch crunchy granola. 
    • And that’s what struck me about walking and driving around Louisville. It seems to have these separate neighborhoods, strips of 4 or 8 or 10 blocks that aren’t linked up. They’re sorta islands separated by runs of dodgy blocks — maybe vacant lots or some rundown housing or a big underpass — that don’t invite continued walking. Like our walk from our AC Hotel in NuLu to the Angel’s Envy distillery. Navigating under the multiple lands of I-65 was poorly lit and slightly uncomfortable and  at 2pm; I definitely would’ve had second thoughts at 6 or 7. Once there, the distillery is a great building; they dropped a sleek new distilling operation between the brick walls and steel beams of an abandoned 1900’s manufacturing building. And it’s kitty corner from Louisville’s minor league baseball park and Against The Grain microbrewery. But then, that’s it, except for open surface parking lots. I’m hoping that Louisville finds a way, multiple ways (some planned, some organic) to grow into the empty spaces and link up these neighborhood islands
    • We had a fun four days in Louisville. I definitely recommend it. Get a car, base yourself in NuLu hotel, and explore the neighborhoods and the riverbank parks. Check out the show notes; I’ll summarize all this into an easy-to-use list of places and links. 

    My Recommendations:

    • La Bodeguita De Mima, 725 East Market Street, NuLu — Great Cuban food; big portion sizes; loved the the Lechon Asado (roast pork)
    • Quills Coffee, 802 E Main St, NuLu — Unpretentious coffee joint on the NuLu/Butchertown border; friendly service; good coffee; no condescension
    • Angel’s Envy Distillery, 500 E Main St — Great tour of the distillery followed by one of the best guided tasting sessions I’ve had
    • Atrium Brewing, 1154 Logan St, Shelby Park — Solid beer selection; good-sized taproom in an upcoming neighborhood
    • Mile Wide Beer, 636 Barret Ave, Highlands — At the base of the grain silos of a former biscuit factory, good bar and wide selection of beer styles

    Closing

    • Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
    • OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #185
    • 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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    • Direct link to the show
  • My Best Restaurants, Bars and Taprooms of 2021

    My Best Restaurants, Bars and Taprooms of 2021

    It’ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with all the restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here are the best places I’ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I’ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.

    • Chicago
      • NoodleBird at Fat Rice, 2957 W Diversey Ave (at N Sacramento), Logan Square — The lower price-point, post-pandemic reincarnation of Fat Rice, a perennial recommendation of mine. Like Fat Rice, NoodleBird’s starting point is the Chinese-Portuguese fusion cuisine of Macau and then extends to other Asian regions
      • Galit, 2429 N Lincoln Ave (just north of Fullerton), Lincoln Park — Great Israeli/Middle Eastern restaurant with a nice 4-course menu that let’s your table try a lot of dishes
      • High Five Ramen, 112 N Green St, West Loop — Small, hip basement ramen joint. Expect a wait, but have a beer and a Texas BBQ appetizer upstairs at Green Street Smoked Meats while you wait
      • MingHin Cuisine, 2168 S Archer Ave, Chinatown — It’s our favorite dim sum place. And they take reservations!
      • Birrieria Zaragoza, 4852 S Pulaski Rd, Archer Heights (near Midway Airport) — Small, family-owned place with a small menu focused on birria (stewed goat) from Jalisco. Warm service and phenomenal food. 
      • Bitter Pops, 3357 N Lincoln Ave (at Roscoe), Roscoe Village — a renovated slashie (bar + packaged goods) that has a great selection of Chicago craft beer
      • Revolution Brewing – Brewery & Taproom, 3340 N Kedzie Ave, Avondale — Great beers; wide range of styles; bring your own food
      • Maplewood Brewery & Distillery, 2717 N Maplewood Ave (South of Diversey), east of Logan Square — Small, neighborhood bar tucked up against the Kennedy Expressway
      • For more taproom ideas, check out this pre-pandemic TravelCommons taproom tour. Three of the four taprooms featured are still open — Marz, Whiner, and Lo-Rez. Only Lagunitas Brewing is still closed
    Sonoran Hot Dog
    • Phoenix
      • Pizzeria Bianco, 623 E Adams St — Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport
      • Pane Bianco, 4404 N Central Ave — Great sandwich place by the same group further north
    Eppiq Brewing
    • New York City
      • Hummus Kitchen, 444 3rd Ave (at 31st St), Murray Hill — Well-executed Middle-Eastern food
      • Her Name is Han, 17 E 31st St (at Madison Ave), Koreatown — Home-style Korean food
      • Craft + Carry – Murray Hill, 440 3rd St (at 30th St) — Excellent selection of NY craft beers on draft and in cans to-go
      • Ted’s Corner Tavern, 523 3rd Ave (at 35th St), Murray Hill — Comfortable neighborhood bar with a great beer selection
      • The Pony Bar, 1444 1st Ave (at E 75th St), Upper East Side — Casual bar with a great beer selection. Been going there for 10 years
    • London
      • Behind Restaurant, 20 Sidworth St E8 3SD, Hackney — Focused on seafood and modern British flavors. The whole restaurant is a kitchen table experience, watching chefs prepare the dishes and then serve them to you. One of the best Michelin 1-star restaurants I’ve visited.
      • The Ginger Pig, Corner of Stoney St and Park St, Borough Market — Bought the best sausage rolls I’ve ever had from their walk-up display. Want to go back and try their meat pies.
      • NOPI, 21-22 Warwick St W1B 5NE, Soho — Fun Mediterranean/Middle Eastern fusion restaurant from star chef Yotam Ottolenghi. Sat at the bar and had a great late lunch.
      • Al Masar, 214, 216 Borough High St SE1 1JX — Strategically located near the Borough tube stop. Solid Lebanese wraps; exactly what I needed after a long taproom crawl down the Bermondsey Beer Mile.
      • Bermondsey Beer Mile, a mile of craft brewery taprooms that have set up shop in adjacent railway arches under a huge brick bridge carrying commuter trains in and out of London Bridge train station. Rob Cheshire, long-time TravelCommons listener and UK craft beer podcaster laid out a taproom crawl that started at The Kernel, the first brewery in on the Mile, and continued through The Barrel Project, Cloudwater, and Brew By Numbers.
      • Old Fountain, 3 Baldwin St (at City Rd) EC1V 9NU, Shoreditch — Tucked into a little side street, it’s a comfortable pub with a great UK craft beer selection.
  • Podcast #132 — Travel Apps on My Phone

    Podcast #132 — Travel Apps on My Phone

    How Are Their Yelp Reviews?

    It’s a listener request podcast. A fellow Peacock, this one named Jack, asked “What travel apps do you have on your iPhone?” Paging back through the TravelCommons archives, I’ve covered different categories of travel apps,  — in the most recent iteration of my Top 10 Travel Tips I recommended some flight tracking apps and way before that, did a bake-off of trip management apps — but never covered walked through what’s in the travel folder on the home screen of my iPhone. I’ve now remedied that oversight. We also continue talking about overseas phone SIMs; the impact of the new EU ban on roaming charges. Also, my first encounter with some new TSA scanning equipment.  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 #132:

    • Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
    • Coming to you, as always it seems, from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Seems that I’ve swapped the romance of hotel bathrooms for the sound quality of the studio here. Seems like yesterday when I was recording the intro in the business class toilet of a South African Airways A340 on the way down to J’burg
    • My travel since the last episode hasn’t been anything quite as exciting. Trips to Richmond, Baltimore and New York City. Indeed, if I tried recording in the toilet of one of those American or United A321s, I don’t think I’d get too far past “Hello, this is Mark Peacock…” before someone started banging on the door.
    • Richmond airport continued to be a problem for me — not the airport itself, just the carriers flying into it. I get up on a Tuesday morning — sidestepping the Monday morning road warrior crush — iPhone notifications from American, TripIt, and Google all say my flight is on-time. Pulling up to the terminal — everything still looks OK. I walk through the doors and my phone explodes — my 8:20 am flight is now leaving at 4 something pm! The next note is from American telling me they’ve booked me on the 11:45am flight, so instead of getting to RIC at 11:20am, I’m now due in at 2:40pm — over 3 hrs late. A quick call to Amex Travel tells me that the early morning United flight has already left, so this is my best option. Since, as I talked about in the last episode, I’ve given up depending on airlines being able to meet their schedules, I hadn’t booked any early afternoon meetings, so I just parked myself in the Admirals Club and got some work done. Nothing lost but a bit of sleep.
    • With this in mind, I was gritting my teeth when I had to head back to ORD the next week for my flight to LGA. I haven’t had to fly to New York much recently, and when I have, I’ve flown into EWR to avoid the nightmare-ish delays being reported from LGA because of the construction. There’d been stories of people abandoning their cabs on the Grand Central Parkway to walk into LGA. And then there’s just flying between two of the US’s most congested airports. I’ve always said that anything less than a 30-minute delay between LGA and ORD is on-time. So I booked my flights to avoid rush hours — leaving ORD at 4pm, arriving LGA at 7:30, and my return flight leaving LGA at 3:30 the next afternoon. I land in LGA on-time. There’s no taxi queue, and I’m into the Sheraton Times Square by a little after 8 — no flight delays, no traffic. I quietly offer up my first beer at The Three Monkeys to the travel gods in thanksgiving.
    • The next day, we finish up our meeting in midtown an hour early, I walk out of the building to find all sorts of cabs. The first cab doesn’t have the time to take me to LGA, but the second guy is happy to. We make good time across town to the tunnel and there’s no traffic on the Grand Central. I tip the guy well, walk up to an American kiosk and see that I can standby on the 1:30pm flight — which will be boarding in about 5 minutes. I hit the TSA PreCheck line — about 5 people in front of me, but the TSA folks are in good humor and moving things along. I hear the gate agent call my name as I walk up to the gate. The flight takes off on time and lands early. Hey, American made up 2 of the 3 hr-delay from last week! And on an LGA-ORD flight. I offered up a bigger beer when I got home.
    • 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

    • Mike Skinner took a couple of minutes to stop by the TravelCommons web site and leave a comment about the last episode. Mike writes
      • “Long time listener, really enjoy the show.“Your comments on the Dreamliner were very interesting to me. I’ve flown one long-haul on several occasions, and yes, the windows are fun to play with. But you didn’t have any comments on what I think is the most important attribute. The 787 isn’t just another “metal tube”….. It is constructed from carbon fiber, and can be pressurized to a higher level than most normal passenger jets. The environment inside is at higher air pressure (like being at 6,000′ rather than 10000′ elevation), with a higher level of humidity (air not so dry), and more refreshes. I found it a great plane to fly on a long red-eye! Or any 5+ hour flight.
        “I’m looking forward to this fall, when I’m flying one r/t LAX-SYD in UA’s BF cabin (14 hour flight)”
    • Mike, thanks for the comment. You’re absolutely right about the 787’s carbon fiber build allowing it to be pressurized at a lower level — I’m not sure if that’s because of an increase in strength from the carbon fiber or because it’s less impervious to the higher moisture content of the denser air. But I didn’t notice a difference between my flight out to on an A330 and my flight back on the 787. Of course, it might be that I wasn’t paying enough attention to the negative — less dry eye; less “cotton mouth” — or that that the LHR-ORD flight wasn’t a red-eye; and so I was able to keep myself hydrated more than I would on a red-eye. Maybe I would’ve noticed the difference on those 17-hr SAA flights to Joburg those years ago. Whatever the reason, anything that makes those long-haul flights more bearable is a great thing. Safe travels on your upcoming flight to Sydney.
    • That A330 flight didn’t go direct to London. I was late booking my ticket and so instead flew Aer Lingus to Gatwick via Dublin. It was the first time in at least 25 years that I’ve been through Dublin airport. It was a nice enough airport, but crowded for an early Monday morning. I was glad I didn’t have to go through security again, because when I looked past the scanners, it looked to be a bit of zoo parade. But, adding again to the multi–episode thread about buying and using local phone SIMs during international travel, I saw the first benefits of the EU’s ban against mobile roaming charges. On the flight over, I’d swapped my US SIM for my UK SIM. Coming out of airplane mode in Dublin, I get what look like the typical welcome texts, but instead of giving me the roaming charges, they tell me that my UK plan is good in Ireland. Might seem kind of a minor thing, but at least for traveling within Europe, there are some real benefits. First is not having to burn through an hour or two at the beginning of a vacation finding a phone store and then going through the hassle of buying a pay-as-you-go SIM. In Paris, I had to go to 3 phone stores to find the SIM I wanted. In Hungary, T-Mobile wouldn’t sell my wife a SIM without a Hungarian citizenship or registration card — which, of course, she didn’t have. Luckily, my wife’s cousin was with her and she was able to buy SIMs for all of us. If I don’t need to buy a new French or Hungarian SIM to avoid roaming charges, this kind of hassle goes away. I wonder also if there’s a bit of an arbitrage opportunity. Now that I have a UK, French, and Hungarian SIM, do I figure out which one has the cheapest rate and then use that one for all of my trips? I need to read the new regs on that one.
    • On my last couple of trips through ATL, it seems that the lines for PreCheck are configured differently every time. Not quite sure why that is. Every other airport, it’s pretty static — go to this set of lanes, but ATL, for some reason, wants to change the entrance to the maze each time. They also have put new parallel loading baggage X-ray machines in the ATL PreCheck line. These are pretty common in Europe but just now dribbling into US airports. Rather than queuing up and waiting for each person to put their stuff on the belt, there are 4 loading stations where a group of people each reach below, grab a bin, put it in front of you, put your stuff in it, and then push it onto the conveyor. Since there are 4 people loading at the same time, there’s no “performance anxiety” to make sure you have your belt-loading choreography flawless, and there’s no eye-rolling and foot-tapping while waiting for those who don’t. There are a couple of hassles, though. First, since it’s new, most people are still in serial mode; they don’t know that it’s OK to break queue and step around to an empty loading station. At many European airports, they have someone telling you which loading station to go to (usually with numbered stickers on the floor — “You, station 1; you, station 6). The TSA hasn’t quite got with this program. Second, if you’re in one of the front loading stations, it takes a little, uh, muscle to break the stream of bins, to shove your bin onto the conveyor. Too polite and you’ll just stand there watching a stream of bins go by. All in all, it’s a definite improvement, but needs a bit of, say, process optimization.
    • And if you have any thoughts, 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 use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page — or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.
    • Bridge Music — H2O by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.

    Travel Apps on My Phone

    • A few weeks ago, Jack Peacock from northern Florida — kinda near where the panhandle connects to the peninsula — pinged me on the TravelCommons website with a couple of questions. First was a genealogy question. Peacock isn’t a common last name in the US and so when we meet, “where’s the last name from” is a common icebreaker. Peacock is probably more common down South where Jack and other southern Peacocks will trace their roots back to a Samuel Peacock born 1671 probably in Colonial VA. My line is from more recent immigrant stock, though. My dad grew up in Southport, on the northwest coast of the UK, between Liverpool and Blackpool, and came over to the US in 1956.
    • That out of the way, Jack said that he and his wife are retired, have put their home and vehicles up for sale, and are getting ready to Airbnb the globe. “Geriatric gap year” as Jack put it. I am officially jealous. Which leads to his second question — what travel apps do I have on my phone? A very timely question since Carlson Wagonlit Travel just released a survey where 80% of business travelers said their smartphone was the “travel tool they can’t live without”, and 45% used airline and hotel apps as their main travel technology.
    • Paging back through the TravelCommons archives, I see that I’ve touched on some categories of travel apps — in the most recent iteration of my Top 10 Travel Tips I recommended some flight tracking apps and way before that, did a bake-off of trip management apps — but never walked through what’s in the travel folder on the home screen of my iPhone.
    • As long time listeners know — and have suffered through — I can’t just go through a laundry list. In other words, I can’t just quickly answer Jack’s question. First, I need to build (and drag you all through) some kind of framework that provides some structure to my laundry list. It’s my own little piece of OCD. One way to start is to split between apps with broad general use — say like Google Maps — and those more specific to a situation — the apps of the airlines you use the most, or, say, mass transit apps for a city you’ll be visiting.
    • Let’s dig down to the next layer of the specific category. I have apps for the airlines I use for 90% of my travel — American, United, Southwest, and Delta — in that order — because living in Chicago, American and United have hubs at ORD and Southwest owns MDW. I have Delta for the odd flight between, say, Atlanta and New York. The mix will change based on what you fly — in Boston, you may have JetBlue, in London you certainly have BA. I mostly use these apps for two reasons — electronic boarding passes and flight status. I talked in the last episode about how I used the “Where is my plane now” feature of United’s app to track back to the source of a RIC flight delay to GRR. Helped give me a sense of whether that delay could shrink or grow. Also, these apps are getting much quicker about pushing flight status and gate change notifications. Indeed, these apps have gotten good enough that the independent/more general flight tracking apps on my phone — FlightAware, FlightView, and FlightStats — are on the bubble. I’ll probably delete two of them and keep one — either FlightAware or FlightView because of how they show the projected flight path on a weather map. You can find this in the United app, but you have to dig a bit. FlightAware and FlightView have it as their primary app view. It’s another good piece of information for when you’re thinking through flight delays.
    • I didn’t load up the Aer Lingus app for my flight to London last month (if they even have one). It’s not worth it for a single flight. Same reason I’ve never loaded Alaska Air’s app even though I seem to end up on them at least once a year. It’s not worth the phone real estate. Which is the same reason I’ve deleted hotel apps from my phone. I’ve never found any value in the Marriott or Starwood apps. Same with the Hertz and Avis apps. However, if I was Airbnb’ing around the world like Jack is planning, I would probably load up their app.
    • Another specific app I have is My EE — the app for the UK mobile carrier who’s pay-as-you-go SIM I use. The last iteration of this app made it easier than EE’s website to do a SIM top-up, so it’s now in my Travel folder.
    • A bit more general is the Priority Pass app which gets me access to international airport lounges through my Amex Platinum card. It regularly updates its list of available lounges and has airport maps to help you find them. This came in real handy in Dublin where the lounge was tucked away on a second floor with very minimal signage.
    • Another kinda general app is the companion app to my Bluesmart roller bag. It connects to my bag via Bluetooth, automatically locks it when it’s out of range of my phone, and displays the bag’s location when I have to check it. The auto lock is probably the most useful thing. It’s consistently on the bubble.
    • I have both Uber and Lyft in my Travel folder. I’ll typically light both of those apps up when looking for a ride somewhere, comparing price and wait time. As I mentioned during a broader discussion of ride sharing a few episodes back, all things being equal, I’ll choose Lyft, but I use both of them regularly.
    • Five years ago, I reviewed the 3 main trip management apps — Tripit, TripCase, and Worldmate — that recreated the old company travel agent’s printed trip itinerary by integrating separate airline, hotel, and rental car reservations for free, and real-time flight updates for a fee. I liked Worldmate the best, with TripCase a solid second. Today, I use Tripit. Carlson Wagonlit closed up Worldmate at the beginning of the year, and Sabre’s TripCase is hot mess of advertising. Tripit has continued to improve their app. The ability to share a piece of an itinerary (a flight, a hotel) through iPhone’s iMessage is surprisingly handy. But the $50/yr Tripit Pro is also on the bubble because of the airline apps’ improved notifications.
    • Google Translate has grown into a critical travel app. I’ve talked in a previous episode about how, with real-time translation through the camera, it’s becoming pretty close to magic.
      Transit is another app that continues to solidify its hold on screen real estate. Transit covers mass transit across North America and major cities in Europe. Google Maps suggests mass transit routings, but Transit goes much deeper — with things like real-time bus and subway data and bike share locations for cities like Chicago and New York.
    • And then, of course, there is Google Maps. I use it to plan trips, find hotels, check out neighborhoods, figure out where I am, share locations — as well as getting me from Point A to Point B. It is probably the most indispensable travel app on my phone. Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder
    • What are your suggestions?

    Closing

    • Closing music — iTunes link to Pictures of You by Evangeline
    • OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #132
    • I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
    • 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 our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website
    • Bridge music from dig.ccmixter.org
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    • Direct link to the show

  • “Now That I Have My Visa, Where in the US Should I Go?”

    As the US dollar continues to swoon, non-US friends, colleagues, and podcast listeners are doing the math and thinking it might just be worth getting fingerprinted and photographed by US Customs in exchange for a cheap holiday. The question I’ve been asked over the past 3 months is “Where should I go?”

    Not an easy question — the US is a big and diverse place. Assuming the folks asking me this question aren’t interested in “Disney World” as an answer, I thought through the places in the US that I’ve been recently and came up with a focused list — one that’s not overwhelming with choices, but will give visitors a next-level understanding of Americans.  I split my suggestions into two tiers —  3 Must-See Cities and 4 Regional Excursions.  The idea is that in a 2-week visit (remember, this list isn’t for Americans), you could hit 2-3 Must-See Cities, or 1 Must-See City with a near-by Regional Excursion.

    Below is my list and a quick rationale for each choice.  While I’ve enjoyed visits to each of these cities, I’ll leave specific sight-seeing suggestions to your favorite travel guide.

    (more…)