These are for cmeckhardt, but I had a posting window open and who knows, others might like them too.

http://www.airlinequality.com/ "The world's largest selection of independent Airline and Airport reviews for over 620 airlines and 645 airports. Passenger Trip Reports, Airline Flight reviews, lounge Reviews, seat reviews - check standards in the Official Airline Star Ranking guide."

http://www.seatguru.com/ "Seat advice for 700+ seatmaps, backed by 25,000+ flier reviews".

Long ago, one of my friends and I were sitting in Liechtenstein--he was getting his Ph.D. there and I was visiting him--and as a thought experiment we tried to figure out how many countries we could transit in a 24 hour period, by train. This was kind of appropriate: that European trip was one of the ones where I was trying hard to see just how many trains I could ride on a two-month Eurail Youthpass. (Answer: a lot.)

Using my copy of the Thomas Cook European Rail Timetable, we came to the conclusion that one could leave northeastern Italy and cross Austria, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Germany, France, Luxembourg, and Belgium, finally arriving in Maastricht, Netherlands, all within 24 hours. There was enough slack in the schedule we came up with that it might even be possible to start in Yugoslavia, if the connections were with you.

As it turns out, someone did it, more or less the way we thought:

According to http://www.britishcouncil.org/learnenglish-central-trivia-trains.htm:

"The greatest number of countries travelled through entirely y [sic] train in 24 hours is 10, by Aaron Kitchen on 16-17 February 1987. His route started in Yugoslavia and continued through Austria, Italy, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, France, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands, arriving in Germany 22 hours and 42 minutes later."

We also discussed whether it'd be possible to transit the same nine countries by car in the same period.

We never did get a chance to try, even after he got an old beater of a French car. But now, many years later with the help of Google Maps I have an answer ( behind the cut. )

Vélib’ in Paris seems to be having more trouble than BIXI in Montréal, if the NY Times is to be believed.

From http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/31/world/europe/31bikes.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all:

Many of the specially designed bikes, which cost $3,500 each, are showing up on black markets in Eastern Europe and northern Africa. Many others are being spirited away for urban joy rides, then ditched by roadsides, their wheels bent and tires stripped.


Renters of Vélib' bicycles in Paris say it can be a challenge to find functioning ones among those that have been vandalized.
With 80 percent of the initial 20,600 bicycles stolen or damaged, the program’s organizers have had to hire several hundred people just to fix them. And along with the dent in the city-subsidized budget has been a blow to the Parisian psyche.

The heavy, sandy-bronze Vélib’ bicycles are seen as an accoutrement of the “bobos,” or “bourgeois-bohèmes,” the trendy urban middle class, and they stir resentment and covetousness. They are often being vandalized in a socially divided Paris by resentful, angry or anarchic youth, the police and sociologists say.

Bruno Marzloff, a sociologist who specializes in transportation, said, “One must relate this to other incivilities, and especially the burning of cars,” referring to gangs of immigrant youths burning cars during riots in the suburbs in 2005.

He said he believed there was social revolt behind Vélib’ vandalism, especially for suburban residents, many of them poor immigrants who feel excluded from the glamorous side of Paris.

“We miscalculated the damage and the theft,” said Albert Asséraf, director of strategy, research and marketing at JCDecaux, the outdoor-advertising company that is a major financer and organizer of the project. “But we had no reference point in the world for this kind of initiative.”

At least 8,000 bikes have been stolen and 8,000 damaged so badly that they had to be replaced — nearly 80 percent of the initial stock, Mr. Asséraf said.

JCDecaux must repair some 1,500 bicycles a day. The company maintains 10 repair shops and a workshop on a boat that moves up and down the Seine.

The Daily Telegraph says:

It is rare to find a Parisian who has not pulled a Vélib’ out of its docking bay ready to pedal off only to find that the chain was missing or the wheels were blocked. At one stage, it was easy to spot a faulty bike, as a previous user would have obligingly turned the saddle round. Now that there are so many ruined bikes, the backwards saddle rule is no longer reliable; only a thorough prior examination before choosing a cycle will suffice.

As for thefts, JCDecaux even has full-time employees who do nothing but scour the capital for stolen or abandoned bikes; they pick up around 20 every day from the streets or police stations, though many are taken further afield. At least one has been found in Romania. Many are stolen and customised almost beyond recognition.

On the one hand, I am suspicious of any analysis that blames problems on France's immigrants, because that often seems to be the favorite French explanation for social dysfunction. Disaffected French youth in general strikes me as more plausible. On the other hand, I haven't been in Paris since the Vélib’ system rolled out, so I don't know from direct experience how bad things actually are. But the numbers sound pretty awful, given that they started with 20,000 bikes.

Certainly the condition of BIXI bikes and stations were nowhere near as bad in Montréal this summer. Perhaps young Québeçois are less angry and resentful than French youths? Boy, wouldn't the French hate that comparison.

I guess we'll see how things go when they roll out the system in Boston next year.

Edit: bikeradar.com suggests that JCDecaux is exaggerating the scale of the problem in order to get a better deal out of the city.

Also, that $3,500 price seems out of line.

Cory Doctorow raises the idea that "Chicago may have lost its Olympic bid due to the insane fingerprints-and-photos regime at the US border: the Chicago bid team was questioned by an IOC member who called the US border 'a rather harrowing experience.'"

(Note: there seems to be something going on with boingboing, because the URL which just took to that page is now returning a 404. Must be a conspiracy! Fortunately, I have a cached copy and will continue to post.)

Quoting the NYTimes Intransit blog:

Did Chicago lose the chance to host the 2016 Olympics because of airport security issues?

Among the toughest questions posed to the Chicago bid team this week in Copenhagen was one that raised the issue of what kind of welcome foreigners would get from airport officials when they arrived in this country to attend the Games.

Personally, I think there were plenty of other reasons for the IOC's decision. I wanted to post here, though, because of three suggestions in the comments to the boingboing post:

From Charlie Stross:

The best airport for clearing US immigration is, however, Dublin.

Dublin?

Yup. The INS has a reciprocal arrangement with the Irish government that mirrors their arrangement with Canada; passengers clear Immigration at Dublin or Shannon before they board their flight, and by-pass it once they arrive in the USA (go straight to baggage claim, pass Customs, and that's it). And the INS staff live in Ireland and have, to some extent, gone native -- they're polite and friendly. Also? If you land in the USA and the INS don't like your face, they can haul you off to prison in manacles before deporting you. But if they decide they don't like you on Irish soil, all they can do is deny you permission to board your flight, leaving you free to go into Dublin and drown your sorrows in the Porterhouse.

Note that you can clear customs in Shannon as well, so you don't even need to deal with US Customs in the States. Wikipedia says that's coming to Dublin when Terminal 2 opens next year.

From Don:

A low stress option for travel to the US is to use a departure airport where CBP? clearance is processed before departure or a low volume arrival gateway. I've flown out of Dublin, Ireland, a number of times where pre-departure clearance is processed and, with hand baggage, on arrival breezed through customs in minutes. Arriving in LAX last year, there was polite sign ushering Aer Lingus passengers past the enormous lines of, mainly, trans-Pacific arrivals who must have been facing 90 minutes before see the CBP man.

And finally, from an anonymous comment:

I prefer to enter the USA via Canada because American customs is in the Canadian airports (YVR, YYC, YYZ). I'm a US citizen but I am absolutely not interested in the power dynamic bullshit from US customs agents. I've been threatened with The Glove and I'm not interested in having to bend over for customs. Literally or figuratively. No thanks.

If you have a conflict with the US Customs agent in one of those Canadian airports, you can just walk unless you've broken a Canadian law.

It's inconvenient and may cost you your flight but it's probably the safest bet.

Just make sure that they don't try to keep your passport or you're in some serious trouble. Technically, they cannot deny a US citizen entry because they lack a passport but they sure won't make it easy. I pity the person who has previously pissed off some customs agent and tries to enter without a passport. :-(

I've flown in to the States and cleared through Toronto's Pearson Airport myself. The process was pleasant and fast.

There's also the advantage of dealing with the Customs and Border Protection people before a long flight, rather than after. This certainly encourages me to consider Ireland as a gateway into or out of the US.

For reference, Wikipedia has a page on United States border preclearance, which lists the ports of entry where this is possible. Ports in Canada, Ireland, Bermuda, the Bahamas, and Aruba are listed, with the Dominican Republic to follow.

Now if I can just arrange a stopover in Aruba somehow...

At least, Gulliver, the Economist's travel blog, thinks so:

The Vélib—the city-wide system of rental bicycles—is superb. It got these two tourists, who would never otherwise have dreamed of pedal-power, cycling all over town. And town felt smaller and more intimate as a result.

But the Vélib is not quite as user-friendly as you might hope. We first-timers spent a lot of time faffing around, working out the payment system, worrying about our deposits, and failing to remove bikes from their stands. We also struggled to find Vélib stations with a free space where we could return our bikes, and ended up going quite far out of our way just to get rid of them.

Sounds like Bixi to me.

I hope they get some of these bugs out of the system by the time it reaches Boston next year.

Conveniently located on Rt. 133 on the way back from Montreal to Boston is the town of St. Jean-sur-Richelieu, QC. Between Saturday the 8th and Sunday the 16th, they'll be hosting an international hot-air balloon festival.

For more information, check:

http://www.montgolfieres.com/ (warning, flash animation) the main site

or

http://corpo.montgolfieres.com/en/index.asp the English language portal

I thought I'd post that just so people were aware of why all those balloons were in the sky when they go home from Worldcon. :)

In Hong Kong at least, the government offers to pay for your hotel room, feeds you, and sends you a box of chocolate in thanks.

From http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/8032753.stm:

Travellers in a Hong Kong hotel have been speaking of their frustration and boredom as they endure a week-long quarantine imposed as a precaution against swine flu.

Officials cordoned off the hotel on Friday after it was discovered that a Mexican who had been staying there had tested positive for swine flu.

[G]uests who had been taken to hospital for tests following the discovery of the Mexican man's case had all tested negative.

Authorities are offering to cover the cost of rooms and expenses while Hong Kong's health secretary sent a box of chocolates to each of the guests to thank them for their patience, reports said.

Guests also noted that the staff and officials had been trying their best to keep guests happy.

From http://desert-blogger.livejournal.com/1686.html:

Let me add, in the summer here in Dubai, last summer in fact, at 2pm one late July afternoon, the temperature reached 51 degrees c. It's fair enough to play upon the environmental cost of multiple short-distance taxi rides, but at 51 degrees? I consider myself a good, global warming-fearing man, with absolute faith in science. To use the term "god fearing" would be an insult to the IPCC. And to add, I can walk a long, long way. But 51 degrees? The way it stings the roof of your mouth when you breath, and the literal wall of heat that you casually stroll into upon exiting an air-conditioned space, that threatens you with a blunt, wooden club of stolid humidity, has to be felt to be believed.

This is ONE HOT COUNTRY. One with no public transport beyond a scant bus network (although the under-construction Metro system is due to open on 9th September), and the subject of the article, the taxi service.

Normally, I wouldn't put up someone's advertisement for them, but this was amusing.

Flights to Mars from only $99
That's right! Expedia has dropped all booking fees—including fees on flights to Mars.

(Thanks to cmat.)

Anyplace I haven't already been. Fortunately there are a lot of those places left.

Question via dpolicar.

From http://www.moscowtimes.ru/article/600/42/374157.htm:

When passengers on Aeroflot Flight 315 heard the pilot make his preflight announcement, they knew something was amiss. The pilot's voice was garbled, barely intelligible — and that was in his native Russian. When he switched to English, it was impossible to understand him at all.

"The first thought that occurred to me was, 'This guy is drunk,'" said Khatuna Kobiashvili, a passenger on the Moscow-New York flight. "His speech was so slurred it was hard to tell what language he was speaking."

As passengers, including a Moscow Times reporter, related their concerns to the flight crew, they were told to "stop making trouble" or get off the Boeing 767 jet. A passenger who called Aeroflot's head office received a similar rebuff.

"They told me that it was impossible for a pilot to be drunk and hung up the phone," said the passenger, Tatyana Vorontsova.

After a chaotic hour during which passengers pleaded with flight attendants, crew and several Aeroflot representatives who boarded the plane, unexpected help came from socialite and TV host Ksenia Sobchak, who was also on the plane, and all four pilots were replaced.

The Dec. 28 incident is a black mark against an airline that has worked hard to distance itself from its Soviet past and assuage passenger fears after a jet operated by Aeroflot-Nord crashed last September, killing all 88 people on board. Pilot error has been blamed for the crash, and a report said Monday that tests had found alcohol in the pilot's blood.

Aeroflot spokeswoman Irina Dannenberg refused to comment for this article, telling a reporter to "read about it on the Internet."

Immediately after the incident, Dannenberg told Komsomolskaya Pravda that the pilots were removed from the plane because of "mass psychosis" among the passengers. In the same interview, Dannenberg said Aeroflot would sue Sobchak if the costs of delaying the flight were "very large."

Passengers said Cheplevsky, when he finally emerged from the cockpit after refusing to do so for half an hour, was red-faced with bloodshot eyes and unsteady on his feet.

"I don't think there's anyone in Russia who doesn't know what a drunk person looks like," said Katya Kushner, who, along with her husband, was one of the first to react when the pilot made his announcement. "At first, he was looking at us like we were crazy. Then, when we wouldn't back down, he said, 'I'll sit here quietly in a corner. We have three more pilots. I won't even touch the controls, I promise.'"

At the same time, an Aeroflot representative sought to assure them that "it's not such a big deal if the pilot is drunk."

"Really, all he has to do is press a button and the plane flies itself," the representative said. "The worst that could happen is he'll trip over something in the cockpit."

Aeroflot's safety record is comparable to other major carriers, but the airline is still viewed by many passengers as being subpar in safety and service, said Yelena Sakhnova, an airline analyst at VTB. "Foreigners tend to think that the company is not as safe as other airlines," Sakhnova said. "Russians, on the other hand, think it is the safest of all of the country's airlines, but many complain about the service.

"It's a shame, because when it comes to many of their routes Aeroflot actually provides better service than many of their competitors," she said.

Passengers on the Moscow-New York flight, however, told a different story.

"We really had a legitimate complaint, and the flight attendants were telling us that we were crazy and we should either get back in our seats or get off the plane," Kushner said. "When we insisted on seeing the captain to make sure he was sober, they sent another pilot out who told us that everything would be fine because he would be flying the plane.

"They only started listening to us after Sobchak began making phone calls."

In an interview with Ekho Moskvy radio a few days after the incident, Sobchak said that while she could not prove that the pilot was drunk, she had no regrets about playing a role in having the crew replaced.

"The man was in no condition to fly," she said. "It took him three attempts to say the words 'duration of the flight.' Even after Aeroflot personnel asked him to do so, he barely made it out of the cabin. All of this is a fact. I will make sure that this person will never again touch the controls of an airplane."

Cheplevsky could not be located for comment. An Aeroflot official said he is currently being treated for an unspecified medical condition. It was unclear if and when he would return to work.

The Independent adds:

The airline is already reeling from a crash last September of an internal flight run by its subsidiary airline, Aeroflot-Nord. All 88 people on board were killed when the plane burst into flames while making a second attempt to land in bad weather conditions. A report released this week said alcohol was found in the muscle tissue of the pilot Rodion Medvedev. Recordings reveal that Mr Medvedev, who was due to land the plane, handed over the controls to his co-pilot, saying: "You see yourself that I can't."

I'll note that Ms. Sakhnova could be right in both respects: Aeroflot could be less safe than other airlines, and it could still be the safest of all airlines in Russia.

Take the train.

On August 1st, in time for the Olympics, China put their first conventional high-speed rail line into service*. It is the fastest conventional train service in the world, with a top speed of 350 km/h (over 215 mph). Beijing (the capital) and Tianjin (the third largest city) are 120 km apart (just under 75 miles).

The trains run at ten minute intervals (as of September 14th, when they added ten pairs of trains to the service) between 6:30AM and 10PM, and cost 69 yuan (about ten dollars) one-way in first class. The new service has cut travel time from 70 minutes to 30.

Wikipedia article

Photos of train and brand new saucer-shaped Beijing South Station in the CNReviews blog posts Part 1 and Part 2.

I very much want to ride this.

*There's already a 431 km/h (268 mph) maglev connecting Shanghai Pudong Airport with a somewhat inconvenient outlying station on the Shanghai Metro. Of course, I want to ride that, too.

...takes longer to drive across than you think.

Also, T-Mobile has really lousy coverage off the Pennsylvania Turnpike in the Allegheny Mountains. For that matter, so does AT&T.

From http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4328:

Top Tourist Spots Americans Can’t Visit
"Looking for someplace special to spend the Fourth of July? FP investigates five fabulous destinations where a summer getaway is next to impossible."

That's a little misleading. Some of these destinations are actually possible for Americans to visit, if you really want to, and at least one is simply unwise: "Because a good day in Somalia is the worst day of your life almost anywhere else."

From http://www.lonelyplanet.com/worldguide/somalia/:
"A traveller to Somalia is spoilt for choice in the number of things that can go wrong."

But as the Foreign Policy article puts it: "Still, the water is lovely."

Bucharest has a terrible reputation. The always irreverent In Your Pocket guide to Bucharest says that "a cheeky but clever wag [they] know" once described it as "A shit hole, but my kind of shit hole."

People warn you of the packs of wild dogs said to roam the streets, and that the old dictator Ceauşescu had many square miles of the historic center of the city flattened to make way for his grandiose building scheme.

Well, it must have improved markedly in the eight years the In Your Pocket guys have been publishing their guide, because I rather liked the place. It won't win any huge awards yet, but it's got character.

Before the First World War, Bucharest was nicknamed "Little Paris", both for its architecture--many of its historic buildings were built during the late 19th century in the French style--and for its nightlife and cultural pretensions. They even built an Arcul de Triumf after the war, although this is now covered in scaffolding.




I stayed a couple of blocks behind the Cercul Militar Naţional:




The Athenaeum is another building from the same period:




It's on a street named after Benjamin Franklin. The street signs in the historic center are all in the Parisian style.

The nearest metro stop was over by Piaţa Universităţii (University Square). I walked past the university every day.




I'll post about the uglier bits of town separately.

Many have heard of Tokyo's Akihabara Electrical Town. I suspect, though, that fewer people have heard of either Yongsan Electronics Market in Seoul or SEG Electronics Market in Shenzhen.

Here's a description of that last one (from http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=147):

As I first step foot into the building, I am assaulted by a whirlwind of electronic components. Tapes and reels of resistors and capacitors, ICs of every type, inductors, relays, pogo pin test points, voltmeters, trays of memories, all crammed into tiny six-by-three foot booths with a storekeeper poking away at a laptop, sometimes playing Go, sometimes counting parts. Some booths are true mom-and-pop shops, with mothers tending to babies and kids playing in the aisles.

And it’s not like, oh, you can get ten of these LEDs or a couple of these relays like you do in Akihabara. No, no. These booths specialize and if you see something you like, you can usually buy several tubes, trays or reels of it–you can go into production the next day.

Stacks of power supplies, varistors, batteries; ROM programmers. Atmel, Intel, Broadcom, Samsung, Yamaha, Sony, AMD, Fujitsu, every variety of chip. Some of them clearly ripped out of used equipment and remarked, some of them in brand new laser-marked OEM packaging.

Chips that I couldn’t dream of buying in the US, reels of rare ceramic capacitors that I only dream about at night. My senses tingle, my head spins. I can’t supress a smirk of anticipation as I walk around the next corner, to see shops stacked floor to ceiling with probably a hundred million resistors and capacitors.

All of this available for a little haggling, a bit of cash, and a hasty goodbye. This is Digikey gone mad. It’s as if they let the monkeys into the warehouse at Thief River Falls, Minnesota and spilled it into a flea market in China, and then some.

And that’s just the first two floors. Six more floors of computer components, systems, laptops, motherboards, digital cameras, security cameras, thumb drives, mice, video cameras, high end graphics cards, flat panel displays, shredders, lamps, projectors, you name it.

One of the commenters says:

It is a whole district with a few buildings full of these stores. Yes, “Buildings”. To name a few, there are SEG Square electronics market building. Hua Qiang electronics world building and also other small building the specialized in cell phone parts. It may not make you rich but can definitely help you to kill a lot of time there. The more experience and knowledgeable in electronics/computing/telecom parts, the more surprises you will get. If you are a real nerd, just like me, you can kill a few weeks there, just like when your first time visiting the NY or British Museum. It is definitely the mecca for any electronics hobbyist. You can easily start any business, build any electronics products in no time. If you know what you are doing. In the cell phone parts building, you have the selections of different parts and also semi-finished (SKD) parts. Just tell them what you needed and they build one for you. Maybe one quarter of the price of an off the shelf similar products but it will not pass any safety test and will not come with any warranty, as usual. Not to mentioned that there are wholesale shops that sell finished products.

Another adds an important warning, which anyone who buys anything in China should remember:

One thing to note. Those Kingston memory modules that were being put into “retail packages” were almost certainly not real Kingston modules. In Shenzhen, like all over China, copies and fakes are everywhere. Sometimes the copy is just as good as the original and it is almost impossible to tell the difference. Other times the parts sold are “overstock”, meaning they are made in the same factory as the original parts and are the same in every way. We call this “fourth shift” production. The original brand never sees a dime from the sale of his branded product. But beware of fakes that are completly mislabeled. For example, you will see flash memory drives labelled 4 GB and when you put them in the seller’s notebook, they show up as 4 GB, but when you get them back to your hotel you will find a nice virus as a gift and when you format the drive, it tuens out to be 256 K. I am not kidding. Also, you will see Products labelled as Sony, Apple, and the like that Sony and Apple never developed. These folks will blindly put anyone’s logo on anything. In fact, in one both we bought some music players and the seller offered to put various different logos on them for us. We could have Apple, Sony and about six other brands.

File under: Another idea for a tour I could do, to go along with the fabric tour of the world.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/travel/franciscakellett/march2008/terminal5.htm:

We all expected a certain degree of teething trouble when the new terminal opened. But stories flooding out of T5 read like something from a Benny Hill sketch.

Let’s just remember that it cost £4.4 billion to get this show on the road. Which would, you’d think, cover things like functioning escalators and an effective baggage handling system.

But, no. Instead of a super-efficient, high-gloss travel experience like you might expect in, say, Beijing’s new airport terminal, our home-grown version has seen T5’s first frustrated passengers scurrying between out of order carpark paying machines and broken escalators – only to be told that their flights have been cancelled.

Those that have arrived at T5 have been stranded in planes as gates have had to be found for their flights. They’ve then had to hang around for 90 minutes waiting for their baggage.

In fact, seven of the terminal’s first flights today left without any luggage at all. T5’s new sophisticated baggage handling system is obviously a little too sophisticated, and has done little to help British Airways’ label of losing more suitcases than any other major airline.

And, to add to the fabulous confusion, amidst the travel chaos there have been hundreds of airport expansion protestors milling around in red t-shirts.

You can almost hear the Benny Hill theme music warbling in the background as harassed BAA workers chase red-clad protestors, who trip over frazzled passengers who are chasing luggage.

It just couldn’t happen anywhere else.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/542bc5ae-fc27-11dc-9229-000077b07658.html:

Day One at Heathrow’s shiny new Terminal 5, and it suddenly all started to seem horribly familiar.

A growing mountain of misplaced bags. Angry, frustrated passengers in the arrivals hall. No announcements. No explanations of what was going wrong, that made any sense. British Airways ground staff present, but themselves bewildered with little useful information.

Long queues at the lost baggage desks filing sorry reports. Growing crowds at the baggage carousels. Passengers lying around on the cold floors because of the shortage of seats. And out front at the sales desks a growing queue of travellers trying to rebook cancelled flights.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

It is mayhem at carousel nine. Two flights were in hours ago from Los Angeles. One three-and-a half-hours ago, and still no bags. Next door passengers from Athens are still waiting for bags after two-and-a-half hours. Many have given up, filed their claims and left.

A BA ground services employee admits, “there is a shortage of staff, we are still spread across all the terminals, and there is a shortage of equipment”. Another says, “it was the volume of departing bags. It crashed the system and stopped arriving bags too”.

Not a good start to the bright new world of £4.3bn T5. They have only been planning it for 19 years.

Finally, they gave up on the whole checked-bag idea.

From http://ukpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5jctHo5GEA-k7o5ZPJcNimRqf1UCg:

A disastrous opening day for Heathrow's flagship £4.3 billion Terminal 5 ended with British Airways having to suspend all baggage check-in at the new facility.

The decision, taken after a series of problems had wrecked what should have been a landmark day at the west London airport, meant travellers could only fly with carry-on hand luggage.

The German railways have this offer on the weekends they call the Happy Weekend Ticket (Schönes-Wochenende-Ticket). (The German link has a lot more information. For €35, you and four companions can travel anywhere in Germany in second class on the local network. That's a lot of trains. They're relatively slow, but it's still Germany, so they run pretty efficiently.

On Sunday, I decided to see if I could get to Cologne by local train. Many years ago, when I was still a student, I changed trains in Cologne's main station. I had a short layover, and I decided I'd go look at the cathedral, which is right on top of the station.



Anyway, that time, years ago, I got as far as the cathedral tower's ticket window. I had a quick conversation with the ticket clerk, and came to the conclusion that I just didn't have enough time to climb the five hundred or so steps to the top. So I turned around and walked back down to the station, figuring I'd be back later in the trip, because I was in Europe for months on a rail pass. I'd surely come back through Cologne with more time than a half-hour layover.

As it turned out, I didn't, and I went home that summer not having climbed to the top.

Years went by. Every time I went past the cathedral on the train I thought about it, but I was always just passing though, often without even stopping. But you can hardly miss it when you go through Cologne's main station.

This time, I looked at the timetables--the German railway has a nifty timetable site--and that if I left early in the morning I could get to Cologne and get back in the same day, all on the one €35 ticket.

It's a nice view. I didn't have a camera with me, but here are a couple of example photos from other people:





On the way back, it worked out that I could give myself a nice train ride along the Rhine, which I'd done before, years ago, but always on an express train. As it turns out, taking the local may be better for sightseeing, because you stop at every little town, and you don't go very fast between them, so you can enjoy the scenery for longer.

(Some more photos I didn't take:)





The white castle in the middle of the river is Burg Pfalzgrafenstein, a toll castle on Falkenau island.

It was a nice way to spend a Sunday, riding a train along the Rhine at dusk. I decided that at some point I should come back with buckets of money and take a river cruise, or rent a car and visit all the castles and stay at some of these inns. Or both.

There are lots of bicyclists in the Netherlands. Very few of them seem to wear helmets.