I must say that I like Boston. It feels a lot like Sydney, and I hope that Boston is the city that Sydney is in another 200 years. Boston has plenty of history (it seems that America happened here, and the rest of the continent came along for the ride), isn’t too built up (not…
Category: Travel
Boston
I am forever glad to be away from Dallas, which seemed to have few redeeming features (although perhaps that’s because I was staying in the worst hotel I have stayed in in the US). I’m now in Boston, where the Kimpton is very nice. It has a hilarious leopard skin print theme, but apart from…
Arrived in Dallas
I arrived in Dallas yesterday. This part of the trip is to attend LISA 2007, spend some time on the Google booth, and present a poster about the initial research in my new-improved-previous-topic-abandoned PhD. I’m staying in the same hotel as the conference, the Grand Hyatt. Staying at the Grand Hyatt has led me to…
Random travel tip: DFW / Dallas Fort Worth
If you’re flying through DFW and have a layover, then this random advice based on my experience yesterday might help. The airport is huge, but bits of it were built at different times. The D gates were much nicer (and had a better selection of food places) than the A gates. I assume that means…
Arrived at Disney World!
We’;re here at Disney World (at the All stars movie resort if that matters). I don’t really have any comments yet, apart from it talking way longer than we thought to drive from Boca Raton to Disney World. Florida seems to be composed mainly of strip malls, gated communities, freeways, and toll booths. More to…
A busy couple of days
Andrew had his school walkathon yesterday — the five year old and I did 16 laps of the school oval before we gave up. The timing was unfortunate, given that we woke yup at 4am today and flew to Florida. Initial impressions: Miami traffic is congested, Navman GPSs don’t work well in Florida, its insanely…
Noisy neighbours at Central Park in Mountain View
Its 5am my time, and I’ve been awake since 3am. Not from choice though — its the downstairs neighbours waking us up yet again. They’re shift workers you see, and must either sleep with construction hearing protection on, or be deaf. Either way, they seem to think its ok to stand outside our apartment at…
How do you spot the Australian kids in an American playground?
They’re the ones wearing hats. Despite it being noon, the various American kids at the playground all lacked sun protection. In fact, they pretty much all lacked practical clothing, it was all way too dressy. Americans don’t seem to have figured out skin cancer at all in fact, every weekend there are bikini clad young…
On Virgin Atlantic premium economy
Welcome to Mikal’s badly organised travel tips. On the trip to Dublin I flew Virgin Atlantic premium economy. That’s kind of like anyone else’s business class, given the classes on Virgin are economy, premium economy, and upper class. It’s much cheaper than anyone else’s business class fare to Heathrow though. I thought that premium economy…
Dublin trip
I occasionally wonder to myself why I don’t blog more these days, and I think the answer is that I’m not convinced that other people would be interested in what happens to me from day to day. For example, when writing the books, all that is really involved is a massive amount of time in…