May 30th, 2008
The deadline for electronic filing of your claim in the credit card foreign transaction fee settlement is tonight (May 30th). More info about the settlement and your options here. The official site is here. I’m just posting this as a reminder to those of you that, like me, put this to the side with the intent to sort it out later. Well, later is just about too late. Have fun paging through your passports.
(No, I don’t know if you’re eligible, whether there are any extensions available, etc. Please don’t ask, because I don’t know. Really.)
May 13th, 2008
Just yesterday, I had recommended Jaipur as a “breath of fresh air” to a friend considering traveling there. Jaipur was, in fact, the highlight of a trip through India a couple of years ago. My impression of the place was one of refuge, of education, of being apart from it all. And then today I see that there was a multiple bombing of this city. This doesn’t change any of those impressions, but it does cast a sad pall over them.
April 24th, 2008
Here we are - the much anticipated team time trial (TTT) on the Road Atlanta racetrack. In the TTT, each team will start all of its riders together. The finish time of the team will be determined by the time the front wheel of the fourth rider crosses the finish line. Any riders finishing behind the fifth rider on that team will be awarded their actual time across the line.
Stage Four takes place entirely upon the 2.54 mile Road Atlanta track in Braselton, GA (about an hour northeast of Atlanta). The course will have twelve turns, ranging from hairpins to long sweepers. The start will be no fun for anyone, as it launches the riders straight into a not-insignificant hill. Here’s a map of the course, after the jump:
More
April 14th, 2008
Wreck of the Gamma. Just off George Town, Grand Cayman. Highly recommended. Higher res available here.
April 14th, 2008
Well, no, because it doesn’t exist. But if there were a hell, this one might go:
A Lonely Planet author says he plagiarized or made up portions of the popular travel guidebooks and dealt drugs to supplement poor pay, an Australian newspaper reported Sunday.
Thomas Kohnstamm, who has written a book on his misadventures, also said he didn’t travel to Colombia to write the guidebook on the country because “they didn’t pay me enough,” The Daily Telegraph reported.
“I wrote the book in San Francisco [California],” he is quoted as saying in the Telegraph. “I got the information from a chick I was dating — an intern in the Colombian Consulate.”
[ . . . ]
Kohnstamm has worked on more than a dozen books for Lonely Planet, including its titles on Brazil, Colombia, the Caribbean, Venezuela, Chile and South America.
[ . . . ]
Kohnstamm’s book, “Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?: A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics and Professional Hedonism,” is set for release next week.
I’m a big fan of the LP series, but I’m not surprised by this - too many people putting together too much info for this not to happen. That said, they’ve never failed me in any substantial way - the closest was a completely wrong ferry schedule in Panama. And I should have checked with the ticket office, anyway.
Thanks to DT for sending this in.
(Huh. Interesting, the things you find when you search for your own entries. Here’s a story on the very same thing, using my LP bookshelf photo. And here’s someone who has decided to just cut and paste my entry on India into his or her blog.)
April 5th, 2008
Aloha Airlines shut down earlier this week. As airlines go, it’s a pretty tiny one. 
So the shutdown won’t really impact anyone but its employees, suppliers, and whoever was recently booked on it. Still, I’m sad, because Aloha was the first airline I decided was *my* airline. They were the airline for my first flight that didn’t involve moving. They carried me and my dad from Oahu to Hawai’i, for a long father/son weekend on the Kona side of the island. To this day, I can still remember being unable to sleep the night before the trip, and repeatedly pulling out and looking at the tickets in excited anticipation. So that 70’s logo you see above is burned into my mind, and represents something that was nothing but good.
Aloha, Aloha Airlines.
March 25th, 2008
Think twice about complaining to the pilot. Some of their pilots fly with guns, and at least one of them isn’t too careful about controlling his weapon.
March 8th, 2008
Now, I’m very clear that the good Governor of Montana and I don’t line up on every political issue. But I’ll tell you what - I’m foursquare behind his style (and the Real ID issue):
“Well, we’re putting up with the Federal government on so many fronts, and nearly every month, they come out with another harebrained scheme - an unfunded mandate, to tell us that our life is going to be better if we’ll just buckle under on some other kind of rule or regulation, and we usually just play along for a while and we ignore them for as long as we can, and we try not to bring it to a head, and if it comes to a head, we’ve found that it’s best to just tell them to . . . go to hell.”
[ . . . ]
“You give me a half a dozen high school students and a Kinko’s, and I’ll show you a birth certificate that looks very very real.”
[ . . . ]
“So that everyone understands, the Montana legislature passed a bill that instructs the Governor and the Attorney General not to implement any provisions of the Real ID [Act], and this is the only thing that I know of that has united the farthest Left to the farthest Right in Montana politics. ”
[ . . . ]
From the interviewer: “Well Governor Schweitzer, what happens in May [Real ID Act "deadline" for state compliance with Real ID Act] if somebody from your state wants to get on a commercial flight?”
Gov. Schweitzer: “They’re gonna show them their Montana driver’s license and they’re gonna get on that commercial flight and nothing’s gonna happen.”
Interviewer: “But that’s supposed to be the deadline.”
Gov. Schweitzer:”Blah, blah, blah, “supposed to be the deadline.” There’s nothing in the Constitution that tells Homeland Security that they’re supposed to do this so they must do this.”
Check out the rest of the NPR All Things Considered interview.
