So I’ve been super, super busy, but I finally managed to get my pictures of my trip to DC in May up. Highlights include a random visit to the Zoo when I was wandering around town, Mount Vernon, a Nats game, and the Udvar-Hazy center out by Dulles, which is fucking awesome and full of totally neat-o planes and spaceships.

Direct Flickr link here, slideshow #1 below (Note, there are a bunch of adorable videos – you can tell they’re the videos because they only have titles, not notes – of pandas chowing down on bamboo that don’t play through the slideshow, click on the thing that says “link” to be taken directly to the Flickr page to view):

And then as a special bonus, Direct Flickr link and slideshow #2, of a hike I went on with my dad and Ray Ann out in Idaho this past weekend:

More photos to come in the next few days – I’m still plowing through the photos I finally got off my SD card from my recent trip to SF to prep for my move. Way more to come on that.

Note: I’m linking to pictures individually as they’re relevant, but if you’re interested in seeing my full photoset for Madrid, please check out my Flickr. I may also do photo slideshow posts at some point, let me know if you’re interested.

Previously: The preface.

GETTING THERE

The flight. Oh, the flight.

Not one, not two, but THREE screaming children in the row behind me. They shut up for a while after dinner, but there aren’t enough sleeping pills in the world to have kept me asleep once the youngest woke up with a hideous coughing fit.

Fog at the airport when we finally made it to Madrid meant circling for half an hour, an aborted landing attempt, then circling for another half hour before actually landing.

And since there had been multiple international flights held up by the fog, passport control was a total shitshow. I also managed to pick the line in which everyone wanted to chat with the customs agent for 10 minutes apiece, so it was past noon by the time I finally got out of the airport.

Luckily, things improved vastly from there.

MADRID: DAY ONE – HITTING THE GROUND RUNNING

Got to my hotel, Hostal Santo Domingo, and was very pleased to discover how nice it was for the equivalent of about 80 bucks a night. Right outside was a big plaza with a holiday shopping area and a temporary skating rink.

The whole city was actually very nicely done up for the holidays, which attracted completely batshit insane crowds. Imagine Michigan Avenue during the holiday shopping season, then about triple it. It was absolutely bonkers.

Anyway, after dumping my backpack, I went to Palacio Real, the old Hapsburg era royal palace. It’s very cool – quite a bit less “let’s gild EVERYTHING!” than Versailles, but with every ceiling in the joint immaculately painted to make up for it.

There was an interesting temporary art exhibition comparing old world and new world art from the Spanish colonial period (surprise! Everyone loved painting religious iconography), and there was a very cool little tour of the Farmacia Real, but the highlight for me was the Armory.

Really, really amazing old suits of armor – I really wish they hadn’t been such sticklers for the no photo rule, because the detail work on these things was absolutely spectacular. Lots of old weaponry too, including the largest musket I’ve ever seen that didn’t require its own little cart to carry it.

Read the rest…

I’m going through all of my photos and writing from Spain, trying to collect everything into something resembling coherence. It’s a little harder than I thought, mostly due to the fact that between jetlag and the intensity of my touristing, I was fucking exhausted for most of the trip.

A few notes about these little travelogue pieces before they start going up (hopefully tomorrow):

• Until I get to Córdoba, a few days into the trip, all of these posts were actually written while I was in Spain – mostly tapped out on my iPad or iPhone while I was on long train or bus rides, or when I couldn’t sleep because of jetlag. I’ve corrected some spelling errors and tenses (I thought I was going to be able to post as I went, but I was just too exhausted), but mostly they’re exactly what I was thinking while I was going around.

• Unfortunately, everything after Córdoba is going to have to rely on my slightly fuzzy memory, since at that point the touristing went into about 11th gear and I was just too tired to keep writing. I’m kicking myself for not writing those cities up on the plane back to NYC, but at that point I was so burnt out with travel insanity (you’ll read why when you get to the Barcelona post) that I just wanted to veg.

• Everything’s going to be broken down city by city. This should work fairly well since I didn’t spend more than 3 days in any single city. Pictures will go up on Flickr first, then I’ll try to link photos throughout each post at the relevant points.

• This will probably take a while – I’m still in school and my classes this quarter are a bit more intense than they were last quarter. However, this is an excellent excuse to procrastinate, so we’ll see how those two factors balance out.

I hope you guys enjoy all this – I’ll post a wrap-up when this is all done, but the bottom line is: Get to Spain as soon as you have a chance. It’s awesome.

YOU actually have to do all the planning.

You can’t fall back on your travel buddy who’s far better than you are at deciphering train and bus timetables, even when you speak the language they’re printed in and he doesn’t.

You can’t divvy up researching the “cultural stuff vs. historical stuff” according to who’s more interested in what, to make it easier to determine what’s actually worth seeing given your time constraints.

You have to read both the “Hey stoners, want to see some cool shit?” and “Hey American middle-aged dentist traveling abroad, want to see some culture?” travel guides you’ve purchased instead of having one person read one and one person read the other, and being able to quickly figure out which sites are recommended by both.

You can’t fob stuff off on your travel buddy when you have a busy week and allow him to fob stuff off on you when he does in turn.

And you have only yourself to blame when you’re up until almost 3am a month before you leave, and you still have only a vague idea where you’re staying or what you’re seeing.

I’m sure the freedom to do whatever I feel like will come in handy when I’m actually bouncing around Spain, but I seriously underestimated how much more of a pain in the ass the planning process becomes when you’re doing it all yourself.

A small set of photos from driving Nate’s car cross-country. He, his wife, their two cats, and their two month old son moved from LA to Chicago, and I offered to drive their car since I was scheduled to have nothing better to do and I LOVE roadtrips.

This is a mix of stuff shot with my good camera and with my phone, since the weather was such that the one day I had for wandering around Chicago, the weather sucked.

Speaking of the weather sucking, you can see how bad the snow was up on Vail Pass when I came through, but there was a stretch of I-70 on the way to Green River, Utah that was much, much worse.

Thunder, lighting, snow, hail, sleet, freezing rain, and at one point I was driving through a solid inch of unplowed snow. It was insane, and I’m lucky that car has damn good traction or I would have been in a ditch.

If I hadn’t been staying with step-relatives in Denver and Omaha for two of the three nights I was on the road, I might have looked at the weather and taken I-40 through Albuquerque instead, though that would have put me right in the middle of a bunch of tornadoes on I-44 the next day anyway.

Anyway, all in all it was a great trip, I got to get my roadtrip on without putting more miles on my car, and I got to hang with my friends in Chicago and stuff myself silly for a couple days when I got in. Good times.

I’m sorry I got on a plane (aka Germ Transportation Module) at 7am and flew across the country while you were battling some throat/sinus crud.

I’m sorry I enjoyed some booze and generally had a life on vacation while the throat/sinus crud got worse.

I’m sorry I somehow managed to get pinkeye on top of the throat/sinus crud.

I’m sorry I then got back on another plane, again at 7am, again transcontinentally, this time with throat/sinus crud and pinkeye.

But seriously, I’ve been home doing nothing but sleeping and using the cat as a heating pad for two and a half days.

Can we please do something to actually get the throat/sinus crud and pinkeye out? I know you must be just as tired of them as I am. Please let me know ASAP.

Love,
Me.

I was watching a documentary in ESPN’s excellent 30 for 30 series about the University of Miami’s football program in the 80′s and early ’90s, and like many documentaries, there were a few shots of newspapers of the day, with the stories related to the program highlighted.

In one instance, however, I was much more intrigued by a story that ran alongside the one that I was supposed to be looking at. The documentary was concerned with a story about Luther Campbell, who was a big booster of the University of Miami teams, getting arrested for obscenity after performing with his rap group 2 Live Crew.

But running right next to that story in the newspaper (unidentified, but I presume it was the Miami Herald) was a story headlined “Pilot Nearly Sucked From Jet”, with the following text from the New York Times News Service:

The pilot of a passenger plane was partly sucked out of the cabin window onto the nose cone of the jet today after its windshield blew out at 23,000 feet. But he was saved by crew members who clung to his ankles for 15 minutes until the co-pilot landed the plane safely in southern England

Several of the aircraft’s 81 passengers said they watched in horror as crew members frantically wrestled to pull Capt. Timothy Lancaster back into the cockpit. The plane went into a dive, but with half of Mr. Lancaster’s body hanging outside the co-pilot flew the aircraft to Southampton Airport, 70 miles southwest of London.

Wait, WHAT?! I have a few clear memories of incidents from the news around this time frame, but I had zero recollection of something like this. Which is probably good because I would have been pretty reluctant to get on a plane after hearing about it.

I was so distracted by the story that I paused the TiVo so I could Google the headline. Turns out the New York Times actually has this story in their archive, albeit under a less eye-catching headline, and it’s just about as insane as you could imagine.

The pilot basically was hanging out the front windshield of the plane unconscious for fifteen minutes while the crew desperately hung onto him by his ankles. The man somehow wound up only needing to be treated for “shock, a fractured elbow, wrist and thumb, and frostbite on one hand.” After hanging out the broken windshield of an airplane in flight for 15 minutes.

A little more Googling turned up a 2005 first-person recollection the Sydney Morning Herald published from one of the flight attendants who saved the captain’s life, with the spectacular headline This Is Your Captain Screaming. That link is well, well worth a read – The abject terror the poor guy captures makes you understand why he had difficulty flying again.

The ironic part is that the pilot, who was unconscious throughout the ordeal, was back at work within six months and was still flying as of 2005.  I suspect someone will track him down next year for the 20th anniversary of this bizarre incident, and I’ll be interested to hear what he’s up to now.

I went to Chicago this past weekend for the annual Reuniafest festivities – My third straight year and one I was only able to make because I got an absolute steal on airfare. I’d been debating whether throwing financial caution to the wind was a good idea, but I am so, so damn glad I went.

The game was awesome (the biggest comeback EVER for Northwestern), the party was fun and Henkel outdid himself as usual, and by staying an extra day I got a chance to actually see people (i.e., the ghettoalums who were considerate enough to drag themselves to the Map Room) and do things other than eat and drink.

Granted, I definitely ate and drank my way through Chicago. Thin crust pizza two night’s in a row (Pat’s Pizza: Surprisingly good), a new Chicago Style deep-dish place (Pequod’s) and of course my last-minute trip to Flattop.

I’ll have an official verdict tomorrow (I usually wait a couple days before doing an official post-trip weigh-in just so my head doesn’t explode), but I think I managed to gain five pounds in four days. THAT is a vacation.

The main downside is that I have caught some sort of rather nasty virus during the travel process. It started out just feeling shitty, tired, and without appetite last night when I got home, evolved into heinous coughing fits this morning, and seems to be on its way to a spiking fever this evening.

I had said to a couple people before I left that I would be extremely surprised if I didn’t come back from this trip with some sort of nastiness at bare minimum, and specifically with the swine flu.

I’ve got an appointment with my doctor tomorrow to see if they think I need antivirals (any kind of bad cough or flu can have super-nasty complications in asthmatics), so we’ll see if it’s the piggy flu or just some other general virus.

Thanks so much to everyone who came out. Despite my current viral travails, this was a really, really great trip and just what I needed to recharge going into the GREs, my first full online course in web programming, and trying to get my application done.

Woo, Chicago!

Photos from my trip to D.C. last week are finally up on Flickr, divided into two sets, and thus two slideshows for your time-killing and/or general perusal.

My set of wandering around D.C. with Jill, with quite a bit of stuff from my trip to the Air and Space Museum:

And my set from Maggie’s wedding:

I went to my erstwhile hometown of Washington, DC this past weekend to attend my friend Maggie’s wedding. It was quite fun and more than a little trippy, considering we’ve known each other since we were five years old and went all the way from Kindergarten through high school together.

Photos of the wedding and some of my wanderings around DC will be forthcoming when I stop being so goddamn lazy about getting stuff up on Flickr, but I wanted to post a few scenes that stuck out in my mind about my trip:

• I’d totally forgotten about the People Movers at Dulles. Seriously, you feel like you’re riding in a time capsule. They’re gone in a few weeks though – When I left I saw them doing test runs of the new train system that will transport everyone between terminals in a more standard fashion.

• The guy working for the woeful Nationals who was at Union Station when I went to meet Jill, practically begging people to come to some of the rest of the games. He got shooed away from the entrance by security.

• Checking out the Air and Space Museum with Jill for the first time in about 10 years, and definitely the first time since I became a major space geek. I practically had a nerdgasm over the Apollo 11 Command Module. I also could not believe how freakishly small the Mercury capsule was. It’s one thing to read about it, it’s another to look at the capsule and wonder how anyone could get in it buck naked, let alone with a spacesuit on.

• Realizing how much DC has changed. And I mean REALLY changed. I came of age at one of the city’s low points, having one of my very first political memories being the mayor getting arrested for smoking crack and then the subsequent mayor proving even more incompetent at managing the city than a convicted crackhead. The city was just beginning to pull itself out of what was basically a death spiral when I left for college in 1999.

  There’s been a great deal of “urban renewal” in the ten years since I fled, and the difference, particularly along the U Street corridor, is jaw-dropping. Areas where my parents used to freak out that I was going to get shot during broad daylight are now yuppie-filled and almost unrecognizably nice. I half-jokingly texted another friend from high school who fled that “Everything is now postmodern, gentrified, and/or unnecessarily huge.”

• Mom, who I was staying with, spent two solid days bitching at me about how I was going to be so deeply under-dressed for a wedding in a black jacket, black slacks, and a red shirt, when it turned out I was hilariously overdressed, as the groomsmen weren’t even wearing ties.

• This was the smallest wedding I’ve been to in a while, I think with about 40 people, tops. I think the only smaller one I’ve been to was my dad’s wedding to my stepmom, which was literally only family. I must say, it was nice since it meant I actually got to have a couple conversations with the bride, who I hadn’t seen in person in several years.

• Going out for drinks with Weigel after dinner Saturday and having a friend of a friend of his turn out to be one of the presenters of a BBC podcast I listen to all the time who was in DC on assignment for six months. It was hilarious, I recognized her voice immediately. She said it was the first time she’d met someone who actually listened to the podcast.

• Sunday brunch with another pair of folks who I hadn’t seen in a few years – one friend from when we were little kids and another from high school, both of whom I’d gotten back in touch with via Facebook. I suppose falling out of touch can happen when you only go to your hometown about once every four years for 2-3 days.

Anyway, overall it was a great trip, and while I was also reminded of several reasons why I don’t spend a lot of time there, I’m really glad I went. As I said, pictures to come.