Category Archives: Travel

Planes, trains and automobiles

May 19, 2010 · 8:09 am

The other woman

My husband is in love with Ms. Garmin Nüvi.  It happened the moment he heard her voice through our new GPS. 

This came as a big surprise to both of us.  He is among the last to fall for any high tech gadget.  He has the most distant relationship with his cell phone.  After four years, he has yet to record a voice mail greeting and usually doesn’t recognize when it rings that someone is calling him.  He recently bought his first home computer but, alas, after several weeks, it still has no software.  He will probably never own a Blackberry.

He bought me the Garmin nüvi for Mother’s Day, intending it would be mine alone to take on business trips. 

Last weekend we went out of town for a wedding, so we took it along to try it out.  My husband was astonished that this woman, who spoke sternly and resolutely through the speaker, knew where we were going and, further, how to get us back on course when we stopped for gas. 

When she spoke, he answered.  “Thanks, sweetheart.”  When she said to turn right, he said, “I’ll do that, sweetheart.”  “What next, sweetheart?” 

As we headed out to the various wedding events, my husband asked me whether we were taking “her” with us.  It was starting to feel like a threesome.  Only she was the one being called “sweetheart.”

After the wedding Saturday night we went back to our hotel and stepped into the elevator.  An electronic voice announced, “Going up.”  My husband gasped, “It’s her!”

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May 13, 2010 · 7:54 am

iOld and iTired

The older I get, the more my thoughts begin with “back in my day . . .”

In this season of weddings and graduations, I think back on how little technology was available when I went through both. 

I made it through college using a typewriter, a percolator and a hot plate.  That’s it.  My husband and I planned our wedding using a three-ring binder, two packs of index cards and some Post-its.

This week, I have backed up my computer files, synced my calendar to my phone, taken and downloaded photos, updated my music collection for a car trip, and set up my new GPS system.

Tending to these tasks involved six different devices. 

It struck me yesterday–as I looked down at the tangled heap of cases, chargers, adapters and USB cables going every which way into the two computers that hum simultaneously, side by side, on my desk–that I too would need a recharge.

iTunes is running on the Dell, syncing the music with my iPod.  The HP laptop is putting my calendar on my iPhone.  The Nikon is plugged in, also to the Dell, and uploading photos to Shutterfly.  Directions from Mapquest are shooting out of both printers, just until I am weaned on to the Garmin.

Meanwhile, the Garmin is undergoing online product registration, but calls for a USB connection to complete the registration.  I see that no USB cable came with the Garmin.  While waiting on hold with Garmin’s customer service line, I type my dilemma in to a Search box.  It tells me the product comes with no USB cable; I need to buy one from their online store or use a cable from another appliance.  I try each and every cable before me, one by one, searching for compatibility.  Eureka, the cable from the WD external hard drive fits!  It’s always the last one you try.

What I wouldn’t give for my Polaroid Swinger.  The only cord it had attached it to my wrist.

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May 7, 2010 · 7:44 am

Chain-free zone

Good morning and greetings from Boone, North Carolina.

My husband and I are here for our son’s graduation from Appalachian State University.  I just couldn’t let the festivities begin without telling you a little about this charming place, where we’ve been coming a couple of times a year for the past four years.

Not everyone knows about Boone or Appalachian State.  App State entered the national consciousness in 2007 when its then-two-time Division I-AA national championship football team beat the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in the season opener.  It was the largest upset in college football history and landed the Mountaineers on the cover of Sports Illustrated.  Later in the season, they won the championship for the third year in a row.

Appalachian State sits high in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina, in what’s known as the Ski Capital of the South.  The student population is about 15,000.  One of the institution’s most famous alumni is Steven J. Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics.

Boone itself is artsy and bohemian.  It’s surrounded by a number of elite resorts, so there’s a cultural dichotomy that sometimes causes friction on the local political scene.

I think what stands out most about downtown Boone is the absence of chain stores and restaurants.  Up and down King Street, Boone’s main avenue, you’ll find one character-filled small business after another.

On King Street, you’ll find no Gap; just The Jean Pool.  There’s no Abercrombie; there’s the Mast General Store.   I was sad to see that the second-hand store, Love Me Two Times, has closed its doors.  There’s no CVS; just Boone Drug, which still has a lunch counter.  There’s no Panera; it’s Our Daily Bread.  There’s no Hair Cuttery; there’s Split Endz.  No Starbucks, only Higher Grounds and The Beanstalk.  No Chipotle; only Black Cat Burrito. The closest Chili’s is an hour away, which is fine because there’s the The Boone Saloon.   And if are you are looking for a cheap place to stay on King Street, you’ll find no Days Inn; only a nondescript  motel with a sign that reads:  2 people 1 bed $29.

What more can I say?

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April 30, 2010 · 8:37 am

Sociology lessons while U wait

Earlier in this business travel season I had the opportunity to spend 11 hours in the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport.

When I posted on Facebook the news of my prolonged delay, four out of five Friends recommend I head for the bar.  My inner shopper begged for retail therapy.  Instead, I went gate hopping.  Every hour or two I got up and sat at a different gate.

I observed travelers and imagined their back stories.  I spotted trends and differences.  Surprisingly, there were more commonalities than differences among travelers at a given gate, from certain mannerisms to the ways in which adults related to their children.  I wondered how these might be linked to their destinations. 

I was seated at one gate when an arriving flight came in.  I watched as passengers entered the airport.   Each one was extraordinarily obese.  Oddly, nearly all passengers wore thin, frayed tee shirts, yet they did not seem to know each other.  One by one, each man who came off the plane sported an enormous, pendulous belly.  It was surreal.  And the women, also terribly overweight.  I was ashamed of myself for noticing, yet I couldn’t look away.  Each woman’s huge breasts dangled freely, inadequately supported by proper garments. It’s like the flight originated in a city without modern lingerie. 

I desperately wanted to know where they had flown in from. It must have been somewhere warm, as it was still winter and no coats or jackets were worn.  Was it a charter flight to a taping of The Biggest Loser?   Was it a city on Men’s Health magazine’s list of 10 Fattest Cities?  I thought about asking a passenger innocently, “From what city did this plane depart?”  But then, I just couldn’t come up with an honest but polite response to, “[insert city], why do you ask?”

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April 24, 2010 · 7:50 am

Busted

I am pathologically compliant.  I obey the law, play by the rules and follow instructions. 

So you can imagine my shock yesterday morning when Central Casting sent their most type-cast North Carolina State Trooper to make me feel bad about myself.

Let me back up a bit.  I was driving home after a long week On the Road.  If you’ve been following my adventures (very un-Kerouac, I assure you), then you know I’ve been enjoying alone time in the car, listening to songs alphabetically on my iPod.  I am up to the F’s.  It was a sunny spring morning and I was singing along with Jackson Browne’s “For a Dancer” when I noticed a twinkle behind me.  I pulled over.

“Ma’am, I clocked you going sixty-nine in a fifty-five,” the trooper said.  I said nothing.

He took my license and registration and, when he returned from his cruiser, handed me a Uniform Citation and said, “This shows I caught you going seventy in a fifty-five mile-per-hour zone.”  I thought to myself, 70 in a 55 sounds serious.

I responded, “You said I was going sixty-nine.”

“I was confused,” he said.  “The last person I pulled over was going sixty-nine.  You were going seventy.”  That’s fifteen miles per hour over the speed limit.  He acceded that the speed limit on that road switches back and forth from 55 to 60, but it happened to be 55 where he stopped me.  He said, “I suggest you appear in court.”

I asked once again why he wrote the citation for 70 mph when he initially told me I was going 69. 

He essentially said, “I’ll see you in court” and walked away.

I sat there staring at the “Defendant Copy” of the citation.  I have never been a defendant.   I’ve never even seen the inside of a court room.  Suddenly I felt ashamed.  My compliance streak was busted and so was I. 

So I got back on the road, stayed in the right lane, and went exactly the speed limit the rest of the way home.  For 200 miles, one aggressive driver after another tried to run me off the road.  Where were all the troopers in North Carolina and Virginia then and why was no one nabbing the speed demons who were on my tail?  Automotive sodomy must be legal in those states.

I’ll be travelling by air next week and will be happy to be out of the car for a while.  Now if I can just stay alert during the boarding announcements (see Word Nymph April 12).

Note:  Just a reminder that Sunday is a no-blog day for the Word Nymph.  This week she’ll be curled up reading the North Carolina traffic code.

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April 16, 2010 · 7:54 am

Boogie on down the road

We’ve taken a lot of road trips lately, Rosebud and I.  I’ve never been one to name an inanimate object such as a car or anything else, but iTunes makes you give your iPod a name when you register it.  Anyway, mine’s Rosebud; I’ll just trust everyone knows the origin.

In the car I have been listening to Rosebud’s entire song list, more than 1,000 songs in all, in alphabetical order.  No play lists, genre affinities or artist groupings.  I am enjoying the way in which the random play renders no noticeable theme or pattern, except that multiple songs begin with the same word. 

Yesterday, songs beginning with “Boogie” carried me a good long way down the New Jersey Turnpike.  Which got me thinking.  Now that I have overanalyzed my magazine rack, and enjoyed the comments on yesterday’s post, I will turn to search for meaning in my MP3.

Does the fact that 61 songs on my iPod begin with “I” or “my” but only 31 begin with “you” or “your” make me an egoist?  Does the fact that I have as much Mormon Tabernacle Choir as I do heavy metal make me schizophrenic?

What other words dominate my song titles?  Setting aside “how,” “what,” “when,” “where,” subordinating conjunctions and other minor words, I watched for a theme to emerge.   “Love” popped most prominently but that’s no surprise.  Except on the devices of a few evil souls, Love dominates everyone’s iPod.  So let’s take Love out of the equation, just for balance.

What’s left in my top five?  “Boogie” to be sure, along with “dance,” “rock,” “crazy” and “bad.”

In the absence of any logical conclusion, I leave it to Avril Lavigne, who sums it up aptly in “Anything but Ordinary,” as she observes, “Sometimes I get so weird, I even freak myself out.”

Note:  After another brief look at song lyrics tomorrow, Word Nymph will turn to another topic.  At least until she is On the Road Again.

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April 12, 2010 · 7:04 am

Blink and you’ll miss it

In order to compose today’s blog entry, I had to perform some computer forensics.

Used to learn what a victim or perpetrator was doing in the days or minutes before a crime, computer forensics help create a chronicle of events leading up to the time such crime occurred.  They tell investigators when the person in question was last online, what Web sites were visited, when e-mails were sent and to whom.

Following is what appears to have occurred on the morning of Friday, April 9th.

9:10 – Return rental car at Pittsburgh International Airport.

9:25 – Clear airport security.

9:30 – Arrive at Gate C51 for 10:21 flight to Washington Dulles.

9:31 – Experience passing amusement:  the Griswolds arriving at Wally World, “first ones here, first ones here!”

9:42 – Complete and save expense report for the trip.

9:50 – Older gentleman takes the seat next to me.

10:00 – Observe a few passers-by asking older gentleman for his autograph.  Listen in.

10:08 – Post the following on Facebook:  “Sitting in the Pittsburgh airport next to a hockey icon who, I’ve overheard from those lining up for his autograph, won the Stanley Cup in 1964.  Nice man but I don’t know his name.”

10:10 – Answer an e-mail while waiting for boarding announcement.

10:11 – Blink.

10:31 – Wake up.

10:32 – Ask older gentleman if flight to Dulles has begun boarding.  Older gentleman smiles and says, “You must be Monica Welch.  They paged you several times before your plane left.”

10:45 – Older gentleman boards his flight to Toronto, shaking his head and laughing with his fellow passengers.

10:47 – Call to ask client to deploy contingency plan for the 2 p.m. meeting on the narcolepsy drug—because I fell asleep. 

Postscript:  I still don’t know the name of that famous Stanley Cup winner, but he knows mine.

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April 2, 2010 · 7:47 am

One away from the No Fly list

I am a fairly composed person and behave appropriately in most situations.  I demonstrate good manners and a respect for decorum and diplomacy.  Unless something makes me laugh.

I regularly make a fool of myself on airplanes, letting out squeals and snorts while watching an in-flight Mr. Bean video short, or muffling howls during a hilarious scene from a Steve Carell movie.  Recently, while reading A.A. Gill’s tongue-in-cheek review of Kentucky’s Creation Museum in Vanity Fair, I came close to being restrained by federal marshals.

There is something about an airplane that, for me, turns ordinary amusement into a full-blown uncontrollable spectacle. Perhaps it’s that people are already on edge, inconvenienced by security checkpoints and constrained by seatbelts in close quarters.  An airline cabin is a place where howling and snorting just aren’t done.

Perhaps it’s the sanctity of a quiet space that pulls the pin on my explosive laughter.  And I know it’s the same stifling sanctity that prompted Mary Richards’ painful laughing attack at Chuckles the Clown’s funeral in 1975.  It was one of television’s most memorable scenes.   A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants.  Mary, I feel your pain.

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