I love actually experiencing the 21st Century. Right now I'm hurtling through the suburbs of Lyon at 265 km/h (down from 300 km/h earlier) on my way to Provence. The Eurostar from London started with an insane scrum at St Pancras—they really mean it when they advise you to arrive 75 minutes before departure—but it arrived at Paris Gare du Nord a minute early. The only impediment to getting onto this train came in the form of several consecutive people who couldn't figure out how to get RER tickets from the machine. Pro tip: use exact change. Also, note to SNCF: your tickent machine UI sucks.
I expect I'll have more interesting things to write about tomorrow as I explore Aix-in-Provence. Monday mid-day I'll relocate to Marseille, then fly back to Chicago through Heathrow on Tuesday.
For now, I'm going back to my book.
Other than the hotel debacle, I'm having a pretty good time in the UK. Yesterday I went out to Berkhamsted to do Walk #1 in The Home Counties from London by Train Outstanding Circular Walks (Pathfinder Guides):
I followed that up today by getting lunch in Borough Market, then walking back to King's X:
(The maps are in French because I set my phone to French to practice in advance of my arrival in France tomorrow.)
The weather yesterday and today has been spectacular, to boot.
Another nice bit of news: I'm now less than 1,000 miles from lifetime Platinum status on American Airlines (with courtesy Sapphire status on another dozen airlines):
That should flip over 2 million lifetime miles when I get back to Chicago.
And now: a shower, a quick kip, and (I really hope) a pork bap at the Southampton Arms.
I mentioned yesterday that I've paid a £319 poor-research tax because I changed hotels after only one night.
The original hotel, the Argyle Square Hotel just south of King's Cross, has mixed reviews. My experience traveling to London for 30 years told me that I could either avoid or ignore the difficulties some people had with the hotel. For example, Americans always complain about European room sizes and British plumbing. Always.
This time my experience failed me completely. This is the best photo I have of my room there:
By "best" I mean that it puts the room in the best light possible. That said, please direct your attention to both air conditioning units (the fan and the window) and imagine how effective they are cooling a 3rd-floor cell when it gets up to 27°C outside. Also imagine carrying a 16 kg suitcase up to the third floor on a staircase barely wider than the suitcase. Also imagine that the bed you see there—hard to tell, but it's just over a meter wide—has not a mattress but a decades-old box spring, so that you can feel each individual coil digging into your body as you try and fail to sleep.
Now imagine brushing your teeth and discovering that the plumbing isn't just quirky, it's producing really off-tasting water. And the shower, barely bigger than a coffin, is nowhere within reach of anyplace to put a towel or a bar of soap.
I have traveled to Europe for over 30 years, staying in youth hostels as a kid and "charming" old hotels as an adult, and I've never stayed in a room that bad.
Contrast that with the room I have now:
Almost the same price. And just the other side of King's X. And with a desk big enough for my Surface, books, charger, and bottle of water. And places to hang my clothes.
Once I fled the Argyle Square, I re-read the reviews on Trip Advisor (there are only 18!) with a more cynical eye. I can't be sure, of course, but the 5-star reviews seem remarkably similar. And the 1-star reviews seem a bit more genuine.
This hotel has over 4,000 reviews and most of them are positive. Not to mention, multiple electronic security measures, and actual plumbing that does not produce horrible effluent.
I am glad I moved.
I haven't posted anything since arriving in London because I made a grievous error choosing my hotel. The room I'd booked was, in fact, the worst hotel room I'd ever stayed in. Worse, even, than the school dormitories and youth hostels I stayed in as a kid. It was so bad that I just decided to write off tonight and tomorrow night and move myself to a much better hotel, for what turned out to be not much more money. I mean, except for the two nights I paid for at the flophouse that I won't use.
I'll have more tonight. Right now, I desperately need a shower.
The last time I took American 90, like this time, I stayed overnight near O'Hare so I could sleep an hour longer on the day of the flight. Unfortunately, last time I had a rehearsal the night before, so I didn't even get to the hotel until 11pm.
Last night I was asleep by 9 and woke up (mostly) refreshed just before 5 this morning. I even got a few thousand steps in that walker's paradise*, the Rosemont Entertainment District. From the hotel, to O'Hare, to checking my bag, to getting through security: all of that took only 20 minutes. And now I'm watching the sun rise over Chicago in American's Flagship Lounge, because Platinum status, baby!
I did not, however, feel it appropriate to avail myself of this particular lounge benefit at 7am, nor did I accept the mimosa the server just offered me:
Tomorrow (or maybe tonight if I get there† early enough) I'll do some real walking. Tomorrow's forecast calls for partly cloudy skies and a warm-ish 25°C—perfect for a 10-kilometer walk in the countryside.
Updates as conditions warrant.
* Walk score: 53.
† Walk score: 99.
In about 23 hours I should be taking off from O'Hare on my favorite flight, American Airlines 90, the best flight I've found to snap into a European time zone in just one night. People tend to prefer the evening flights that get to Heathrow the next morning so they "don't lose a day," but I've found that even when flying business or first class (and thus getting actual sleep for a couple of hours) I lose the first day in Europe anyway. Sleeping on planes just sucks.
American 90, on the other hand, takes off from Chicago before 9am (most days) and gets to Heathrow before 22:30 (most days). That's still early enough to catch the Tube or Elizabeth Line, though on a couple of occasions I've had to catch the Night Bus. More important, for 48 weeks of the year, 22:30 in London is 16:30 in Chicago. Assuming I get to the Tube by 23:00, I'll be at my hotel before midnight and asleep before 2. Next morning, I'm totally fine.
I also like that the flight rarely sells out. Just look at my good luck tomorrow:
My whole row is empty, and so is the one in front. Even if they sell half of those seats in the next 22 hours, I expect they won't fill the middle seats in our row, with aisles and windows still available nearby.
Even though the flight works great for jet lag just because of its schedule, I still got up wicked early this morning to help the process along. Cassie and I took a 5½-kilometer walk around the neighborhood and caught Our Lady of Lourdes just as the sun came up:
Not a bad way to start the day.
I went out to Suburbistan to have dinner with an old family friend, and he surprised me with an unusual and very cool heirloom that his own father, Bill, left him:
That's an HO-scale model that Bill built out from kits probably back in the 1970s. Must have taken him weeks, with the detailing and the weathering. I thought putting it in front of a 1970 edition Britannica fit pretty well.
But since I went out to Suburbistan, Cassie had to wait bloody hours for dinner. She didn't seem to mind getting a little couch time afterward:
Today I'm working from home so she doesn't see any need to follow me around. And she's about to get a 30-minute walk, which should help with any residual feelings of neglect that may linger from yesterday.
The intersection of my vacation next week and my group's usual work-from-home schedule means I won't come back to my office for two weeks. Other than saving a few bucks on Metra this month, I'm also getting just a bit more time with Cassie before I leave her for a week.
I've also just finished an invasive refactoring of our product's unit tests, so while those are running I either stare out my window or read all these things:
- Yes, Virginia (and Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina), you are much better off than you were four years ago.
- The Illinois Attorney General has filed an environmental suit against Trump Tower for refusing to fix its water-intake system.
- A New York City cop who fought against "courtesy cards" won a $175,000 settlement from the city.
- A developer plans to raze a 175-year-old house in Glencoe, Ill., designed by William Boyington, because we can't have nice things anymore.
- Speaking of not having nice things, after £175m spent and 12 years of construction, the Old Street roundabout in Islington, London, looks...about the same as before.
Finally, the New York Times ran a story in its Travel section Tuesday claiming Marseille has some of the best pizza in Europe. I will research this assertion and report back on the 24th.
I just finished a 75-minute open-level French test as part of a QA study that Duolingo invited me to participate in. What an eye-opener. And quelle épuisement!
The test started well enough but got a lot harder as it went on, for two principal reasons. First, the order of sections went precisely in the order of my abilities: reading, writing, listening, speaking. Turns out I read French a lot better than I write it, write it better than I understand it, and speak it like a reject from a Pink Panther film. Some poor evaluator will have to listen to me going on for nearly three minutes about how hard the job of cat-herder is. What's worse, I only just now learned the word berger. "Herder des chats" is, apparently, not a thing, but berger de chats potentially is. I hope whoever scores that response at least has a sense of humor.
The second reason it got harder is that "open level" bit I mentioned. Each section got progressively more difficult, such that by the end of the listening part I could barely pick out the topic let alone individual words. Senegalese fishermen, you may be surprised to learn, are harder to understand than recorded announcements at train stations.
Still, I'm glad I did it. I don't know if they'll share the results with me, because they only want the data to calibrate their language-learning product. I hope they do, particularly before I pop out of the Chunnel just over two weeks from now.
I'm dog-sitting again, so a nervous beagle wandered up to my office during the test to see why I hadn't fed her yet. I suppose they both could use an around-the-block and some kibble. I will try to speak French to them, if only for my own practice.
Oh, and if you haven't been able to get to Weather Now this afternoon, that's because I shut it down for a bit while I root out a connection-exhaustion problem. I believe there are too many bots hitting it the last few days, but it still shouldn't crash when they do. Until I can fix the problem, or get rid of the bots, I'm only going to have it up a little bit at a time. (Its data collection continues unaffected, however.)
I spent 56 minutes trying to get ADT to change a single setting at my house, and it turned out, they changed the wrong setting. I will try again Friday, when I have time.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world:
Finally, Slow Horses season 4 came out today, so at some point this evening I'll visit Slough House and get a dose of Jackson Lamb's sarcasm.