I recently had cause to fly down to Gainesville Florida. For a variety of reasons, I looked at flights from Indianapolis to Gainesville, which involved going to Charlotte and taking a regional jet (specifically, a CRJ700) to Gainesville.

Now, largely because I live in the Chicago area and fly Southwest, I wasn't very familiar with these jets. But ( Read more... )

I arrived back in Darien last night after a four-night, three day visit to Lost Wages, also known as Las Vegas, NV. It's the first time I've been there in at least five years. Herewith is a long report on the same.

Flying in the (hopefully) tail-end of a pandemic

I flew out of Midway Airport on mid-day Thursday and back in on Sunday afternoon. On ( Read more... )

I had occasion to visit the Salt Lake City area over the 4th of July weekend. Herewith, some random thoughts.

1. The greater Salt Lake City area is very north-and-south. All of metro Salt Lake and thus the majority of people in the state are jammed into a strip of land around 10 to 15 miles wide between the lake and the Wasatch Mountains. The later ( Read more... )

This week, I spent four of five working days attending a training class in downtown Chicago AKA The Loop. Since it was a 9-to-5 kind of thing, I took the train in, specifically Metra's Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) line. It is the busiest Metra line in the system, and runs (in my case) from Westmont into Union Station ( Read more... )

As discussed previously, I have been less-than-enthusiastic about attending this year's Worldcon in Dublin. Well, my lack of enthusiasm has led to a decision. I will not be attending Worldcon. I will, in fact, be donating my attending membership to the Fantastic Dublin Fund, which is attempting to get a more diverse group of attendees to ( Read more... )

As mentioned, I flew to Honduras for the long weekend. The purpose of my visit was to meet fellow Rotarians in support of a project to build a school in a rural area of Quimistan, a municipality in the Santa Barbara Department. (Here's a link to my Facebook photo album of the trip ( Read more... )

Over the long weekend, I flew to Honduras and back. Boy are my arms tired! [Yes, I plan on keeping the day job.) The purpose of the visit was to investigate sites for charity work, specifically building schools. I'll have more details on that portion of the trip later, but since I got back home at 9:30 PM, not today. Today I'll have some ( Read more... )

Travel decisions need to be made, and thoughts from the wisdom of my readership are welcome. As of right now, I am sitting on an attending membership for this year's Worldcon to be held in Dublin Ireland in August. That's looking to be, well, costly ( Read more... )

My trip odometer tells me I just put 799 miles on my car. This was because I drove up to Door County, Wisconsin and back for a week's vacation. Google tells me that 534 of those miles were spent getting there and back, which means I drove 266 miles around Door County. So what did I do?

1) Visited Washington Island. There's not much to see ( Read more... )

As you may have heard here, I recently visited The Old Soil, AKA Lithuania. It's a cute country in Eastern Europe with a bad history of getting absorbed by Russia. It's also a small country, with around 2.8 million people, roughly the same population as Kansas ( Read more... )