Category: travel

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More congrats!

First, Official VM just-about-closest-friend-in-the-world Ian gets his chief petty officer pin, and now he goes off and pops the question to his One True Love! Much congratulations are in order! Go, Ian!

In additional friends-of-VM news, my buddy Faiz reveals the true reason he couldn’t meet up with me & Amy in Paris: he and his wife are expecting their first kid! (And Paris is evidently inimical to developing life!) Also, I’ve been insanely remiss in not mentioning Faiz’s first children’s book, My Alien Penfriend! Go, Faiz!

That’s the extent of the super-wonderful news. In not-so-wonderful news, it looks like I’ve got an upper respiratory infection, so I’ve got some antibiotics working on that. Go, azithromycin!

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Like Letting Pitcher Fly Plane

No one needs to remind me that I’m a mean person. I get pretty constant reinforcement.

For example, when Amy said, “It looks like Cory Lidle was the pilot of that plane that crashed in NYC,” my first response was, “It couldn’t have been Jaret Wright?”

I’m a mean person AND a Yankees fan. Sue me.

(Back in college, my buddy Toure responded to the news of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s helicopter crash with “Damn! Why couldn’t it have been Eric Clapton?”)

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Flight Delay

I corresponded today with one of the exhibitors from last week’s Paris conference. He wrote, “I hope that you had a safe flight back. We were stuck outside the terminal for over an hour because of a unattended bag, which they blew up outside the terminal. Besides that we had an easy flight home.”

I replied, “Did you get to see the bag get blown up, at least? That would’ve helped mitigate the delay a little bit.”

Alas, no: “Unfortunately I did not get to see the bag get blown up, but I did get to see the remnants. They just dumped the contents on the sidewalk: some clothes, lots of rice, and spices.”

* * *

It reminds me of the baggage carousel when we got back to Newark. Some luggage came out, but there was also a small pile of panties rolling along. I said, “Wow! Did someone get raped in the cargo hold?!”

It had been a long day.

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You’re IT!

This conversation from BusinessWeek explores the question, “Does IT Matter?”

This article from BusinessWeek about the software problems leading to Airbus’ $6.1 billion wiring problem answers the question pretty handily, I think.

Both of our flights for this trip were on Boeings (767-200 and 757-200), and they were pretty smooth, except for the hydraulic problem I mentioned for yesterday’s flight home. When we touched down, I said to Amy, “Well, I guess the hydraulics worked, huh?” She joked that, when we looked back from the jetway, we’d notice that the plane had flat tires.

Followup: Airbus’ CEO quit after 100 days on the job, because he couldn’t get authority to make the sweeping changes. What’s BW say today?

The debacle has exposed a fundamental Airbus flaw. Far from the smooth-running pan-European group depicted in its public relations, its units in Germany, France, Britain, and Spain remain surprisingly balkanized, each clinging to traditional operating methods and cross-border jealousies. “It is still, in part, a juxtaposition of four companies,” Streiff [the departing CEO] told the French newspaper Le Figaro in the only interview he has given since resigning.

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Home!

In safe and sound, after a 75-minute delay in CDG because of problems with the hydraulics! Customs snagged our sausages, which we bought in duty-free as gifts for our fathers. This peeved me to no end. Amy was already peeved when the second security point at CDG took her jars of mustard and jelly from her carryon (we didn’t want to risk them breaking in the checked-in bags).

Anyway, I’m rolling down the street to grab us a pizza. Maybe we’ll watch baseball and be all American. Even though my Yankees got knocked out in the first round of the playoffs today. Grr.

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Fauxhawk Friday

Well, Amy said that on Fauxhawk Friday, Musee D’Orsay offers free admission, and I fell for it.

They charged for admission, but it was all worth it. Orsay’s a fantastic museum, between the collection and the crazy vibe of an antiquated vision of the future. (In a sense, I suppose that grotesque Centre Du Pompidou provides another of those visions, but it appears to be one circa 1975, a period that should just be avoided.)

Anyway, we both posted our new pix to our flickr photosets (hers and mine). They’ll likely be the last pix from this trip, since it’s raining cats and dogs outside, and we’re heading out tomorrow.

Fortunately, we got a bunch of shopping done today. I wasn’t able to find great stuff for everyone in my life, but we both found some pretty neat gifts (and some nice treats for ourselves).

How we’re gonna pack all this stuff, I have no idea. Thanks for checking in on these posts. I know I haven’t gone off and posted 2,000-word rants on “Paris & Yesterday’s Tomorrows” or anything, but I did receive some illuminations during the trip, which I hope to share with you, dear readers.