Category: travel

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Gambles

(Ah, just go to the slideshow.)

Made it back from Vegas safe and sound on Tuesday. The event was a disaster: the exhibit hall was so far from the conference sessions that few of the attendees stopped in to see us. I knew things would be bad when I picked up my exhibitor/press badge on Sunday afternoon.

I asked a staffer, “Where’s the exhibit hall?”

“Well, you can see it if you look out the window over there, behind the pool area.”

“Do I have to jump out the window to get there?”

“No. If you take the escalator down three floors, turn left, go through that section of the mall, make a left by the towel station, turn right as you get outside by the pool, then follow the covered walkway past the construction signs, you’ll be right there.”

“. . . Really.”

“There’s a map in your conference-bag!” the staffer added. It was, after all, a conference for engineers. I shook my head resignedly, checked my cell phone for the time, and started walking to the hall. It took 8 minutes on foot.

Over the next two days, the 300 tabletop exhibitors joked about how overwhelmed we were with foot traffic, and how we might run out of giveaways. One guy was reading through the Society’s upcoming events. “Oh!” he said. “Next year’s conference is in Boca and ‘exhibit space is limited.'”

“Yeah,” said another, “limited to the number of guys who actually bother to exhibit after this experience.”

You have lots of time to make these jokes when your exhibit hall opens at 7:15 in the morning. In Las Vegas.

We concluded that we’d have had a better chance of reaching the attendees if we set up the exhibits next to the slot machines and poker tables in the casino. But you go to Vegas, and you take your chances.

I mean, you take a chance that your hotel will actually have the non-smoking room you reserved. I lost that bet, and spent three nights unable to do much by way of breathing. Fortunately, I was able to, um, bask in the showbiz-itude of the Planet Hollywood decor. In this case, my room had several framed photos and pieces of memorabilia to celebrate the wonderfulness of movies and TV.

There was a photo from Batman Begins of Christian Bale carrying Katie Holmes, one of Sylvester Stallone and Sharon Stone looking worried in The Specialist (I’d be worried if James Woods was after me), one of Harrison Ford walking by a wall of servers, which I guess was from Firewall, that movie where he tries to convince a major corporation to move over to Linux.

And then there was a frame that held a piece of a Wheel of Fortune, and an issue of TV Guide signed by Vanna White. Because that’s Planet Hollywood.

Anyway: speaking of risk, I didn’t lose a bunch of money while there. I gave myself a severe set of restrictions on slots-playing, didn’t sit down at card table because it’s no fun to do without friends around, and had my faith in Peyton Manning (and six points) rewarded on a $50 bet. Despite having put so much work into an NBA season preview, I didn’t lay a single basketball bet.

On the way out of Caesars Palace to the airport, I remembered that I had a $10 betting slip in my wallet. I haven’t been in a casino in years, and didn’t know that they issue your cash-out with bar-coded slips that you can cash in at an ATM or use to bet more. Even if you only have 25 cents to cash out, you’ll get a slip (I tried it). Anyway, I put that in a dollar-slot, figured I’d hit 4 spins and leave. With $4 left, I hit for $25, and decided, “Well, that’s cabfare back to the airport,” cashed out, and hit the road.

As it turned out, my biggest gamble on the trip was at the airport. I got in around 11:25am for my 2:20 pm flight, and started my e-check-in. I figured I’d find a lounge and do some reading/writing, but the check-in screen told me that there was an earlier flight I could switch to: the 12:15. But it wouldn’t tell me what seat I would get.

Now, as a frequent-enough traveler, I have “Elite” status on Continental, which usually gets me a seat in the first row or two of coach. I figured that wouldn’t be the case with this earlier flight, especially since it looked like that flight would be boarding in 5 minutes. I decided, “I don’t care where I’m sitting; if I can get in at 8:15 instead of 10:30, I’ll be happier.” I confirmed the flight-switch.

It told me I’d be in row 40, seat F, and that boarding would begin in 5 minutes. At this point, I still had to go through security and then board the monorail that would get me to the right terminal. I made like O.J. (okay, “like the O.J. in the Hertz commercials”). I got through security quickly enough and, just before the monorail, I saw the departures screen and noticed that my flight was delayed till 12:50.

40F didn’t turn out so bad. There weren’t many people at the rear of the plane, and the 757-300 configuration had the restrooms up around rows 31-32, so I didn’t have a long line of impatient people standing by my seat.

So I Xanax-ed into relaxation, ready to leave behind Las Vegas, its commonplace spectacles and its idiotic conference venues. Aloft, I looked out the window to see the Valley of Fire. A series of astonishing views spread out below us: lakes, rivers, canyons, buttes. The gridlines of development were missing from this country, I thought.

And over the PA, a stewardess said, “In order to better enjoy your in-flight entertainment, please lower your window shades. Our movie this afternoon will be Hairspray, starring John Travolta.”

I think he would’ve approved of my decision to leave the shades up.

(Now go to the slideshow, darnit!)

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Is that you, Streaky?

Men are from Mars, women are from Venus . . .

. . . and Siegfried and Roy are from Krypton.

This may be the greatest photo I’ve ever taken.

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I was so close!

The flight got pretty bumpy about 90 minutes from LV. Fortunately, I was on Xanax, so I wasn’t as uptight as I usually get during flights.

That said, I DID think to myself, “Ferchrissakes! I have THREE GODDAMN PAGES of Middlemarch left! I will be SO pissed off if we go down before I finish it!”

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De-LAYED!

Flight was delayed almost two hours because a passenger had a breathing device that wasn’t cleared to fly. One of the stewardesses was the first person to notice that the device might need to be checked out, which is a little late in the process.

Having seen enough of the passengers shamble up the aisle to the restroom, I’m convinced that we were actually loading up on extra fuel.

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Leaving (for) Las Vegas

I haven’t been to Vegas since January 2004, when I helicoptered into the Grand Canyon and was stage-side for a Tom Jones concert at the MGM, but I’m 70 minutes from boarding my flight to this year’s ISPE conference in the Unreal City!

This trip should be less eventful than that last one, mainly because I’ll only be in the city for about 65 hours, and I’ll have to sleep for part of that. Also, the exhibit hall hours start at 7:15am on Monday & Tuesday. Ouch.

Some business-related pals will also be at this show, so I foresee some decent dining (and some drunken football-viewing and -betting that will happen on Sunday). That said, Vegas itself isn’t conducive to my kinda picture-taking, so I doubt there’ll be a great Flickr set coming out of this trip. But if there is, you’ll be the first(ish) to know.

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Springboks Supreme

I watched the finals of the Rugby World Cup this afternoon, and was disappointed to see South Africa’s Springboks knock off England 15-6, esp. after a British try that got overturned by the blind video-judge. Considering South Africa blanked England 36-0 earlier in the tournament, I guess this loss could be considered a little more palatable, particularly since England got to defeat France to get to this point.

I’m not sure why I was rooting against South Africa. Maybe it was an apartheid hangover, maybe it was because they tried to kill Joe Pesci in that Lethal Weapon movie. Or maybe it was the Aryan weirdness and unmoving hair of Percy Montgomery.

Amy & I never did get around to figuring out all the rules, but the games we watched here and in Milan were pretty entertaining. As a contrast, I also got to attend the Jets/Giants game a few Sundays ago, and that got me to thinking about the rugby vs. U.S. football debate. (Here’s a slideshow from that game, tickets courtesy of my buddy Jon-Eric.)

When I was in New Zealand in 2003, some of the antipodeans goofed on me because NFL players wear pads, while rugby players are, um, unprotected (and adventuresome!). I pointed out that NFL linemen are probably 6-10 inches taller than rugby players, a hundred lbs. heavier, and only a step or so slower. Or, as official VM buddy Tom Spurgeon put it, “Would your rather crash full speed into a wall on your bicycle or in a car?”

Anyway, having watched a few matches, I can see that top rugby players are in better shape than NFL players, since there’s really no break in the action (I think halftime is only 10 minutes long), very few substitutions, and lots of ugly hits that these guys keep managing to get up from.

For me, that was a big factor that made rugby fun to watch: no one takes a dive. One guy went down during this match, and the medico ran over to treat him while the game kept going on. There’s none of the flopping that characterizes soccer (and now the NBA), none of the “I’ll never walk again” writhing that ends 15 seconds later with the player getting up and running downfield.

Of course, most of the rugby players also have cauliflower ears, swollen brows, and cognitive impairment, but I’m pretty sure that last one was what led them into rugby to begin with.

* * *

Virtual Memories bonus! When I visited New Zealand (see enormous slideshow), my flight into Auckland landed the morning after the finals of the 2003 Rugby World Cup. The pilot spent a good five minutes describing the action from the game, in which England beat Australia in overtime. After 12 hours in the air (this followed a 6-hour flight from EWR to LAX), I wasn’t exactly in the mood for the George Michael Sports Machine, but he made it entertaining while we taxi’d to the gate.

Days later, on a Saturday morning, we cruised along in our tour bus. I watched the countryside and small towns roll by, and then I saw something that I never bothered to share with anyone. In the front yard of a house, at 8 o’clock in the morning, a kid (he had to be under 10) was marching back and forth carrying a large sign that read, “POMMY RUGBY IS BORING!”

I can only assume the kid lost a bet on the finals.

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Book Barren

Before a trip, I usually find myself downstairs in our library, looking at 1,200-odd books and trying to figure out how much reading time I’ll have, what mood I’ll be in during the trip, how much weight I’m willing to carry in my bag, and what book will make me look unapproachably smart in the terminal and on the plane. This time around, I was too harried to think straight, and so, last week in Milan, I got stuck without a book.

This almost never happens to me. I knew there would be plenty of time to read on this trip, but I foolishly brought along only a brief (350 pages) novel I was halfway through (Spook Country) and a 110-page play (Rock n Roll), both of which I wrapped up by the second day of the trip. It was time to employ The Eco Strategy.

Unfortunately, the first two bookstores I checked out had no English-language section. Since I was on conference-schedule from then on, there was no time to look up and visit a specialty store (Amy sez there was one over by Castello Sforzesco).

I stopped in at one near our hotel and discovered a very small Inglese shelf. The books were mostly UK Penguin editions, and the most contemporary writer on the shelf was Beckett. So I found myself studying a collection of classics to figure out what the heck could occupy me for the rest of the trip and the 8-hour flight home.

I considered picking up Nostromo, but thought, “That book killed David Lean; there’s no way I’m going to make it.”

Trollope? I wouldn’t know where to start.

Bleak House? My cheap-ass stereotype kicked in, as I picked up a new copy a year or so ago, in the hopes of re-reading it.

A Room of One’s Own? Tried it on three different occasions and never got into it. (Tried reading Mrs. Dalloway twice: same result.)

F. Scott Fitzgerald? I’d be back in the same bookless boat a day or so later.

Then it hit me: Middlemarch! Sure, I had a copy at home, but it was mass-market paperback, and this edition was larger and more readable (I’m getting old, and mass-market typesetting is beyond my eyesight).

I started Middlemarch once back in college, but got derailed due to some piddling matter like coursework. But now it would be the only book in my possession! I’d be sure to get so far into it that I wouldn’t just bail partway through! Plus, it would make me look smart and out of step with the times! The back-cover blurb was from Henry James, fergoshsakes!

From the first chapter, as George Eliot relates the marriage prospects and religious tendencies of Dorothea Brooke, I got to thinking about the nature of sprawling novels like this one. Over its 800 pages, the book attempts to canvas the interweaving lives and classes of a town in 1832 England. I wondered how contemporary readers — outside of academia, that is — would devote themselves to this sort of project. Do people have the patience to read a book like this one? I find it charming in parts, and possessed of enough tension and engaging characters to outweigh the archaicness of some of the language.

But I also find myself facing a variant on the suspension-of-disbelief: that is, I feel as if I have to slow down, to reframe my perceptions to an era in which communications were slower and religious and ideological debates were of a different stripe. That’s not to say that it’s some sorta relic. Dorothea’s zealotry, Casaubon’s arm’s-length distance from the world, Fred’s slacker college-kid are all vivid characters and could easily transpose into the present. Still, a novel like this requires a different way of thinking than that to which I’ve grown accustomed in these past hyperaccelerated years.

Finishing Book One (about one-eighth of the novel) on the flight home, I felt confident that I could stick with this novel and its pace, that I can slow down from this frenetic pace.

Then I thought, “In eight hours, I’ve probably traveled more miles than George Eliot did in her entire life.”