Packing and Hovercrafts

Time for frantic packing.  I'm actually doing fairly well for me.  I usually don't start packing until at least 9pm the night before I leave, even if I'm leaving the house at 4am to catch a 6am flight.  I've been doing mental preparation for a while and actually did some shopping too, so I figure things will go relatively smoothly.  Plus it's not exactly like I'm traveling to outer space.  Whatever I forget I can either replace or do without.





In preparing my “digital toolbox” for this trip (including the very blog you are reading), I stumbled across yet another nifty Google tool, Google Translate.  I can speak into the iPhone /iPad app and it can either speak back the translation in the language of my choice, or display the text in either standard or billboard form.  As a test, I tried the oft-used travel phrase “My hovercraft is full of eels.”  I can now hold up my iPad by the side of the road (or the side of my hovercraft) and announce this freely to the world.  Take that, Mr. Weiss!

Mr. Weiss was my senior high school French teacher.  He was  (and undoubtedly still is) an incredibly nice guy.  I had him in 10th grade which was his first year teaching and I abused him mercilessly.  I had him again in 12th grade by which time he figured the teaching thing out and held his own.  We had a bit of a Mexican (or perhaps given the context, Lyonnaise) standoff over a dynaorama project he assigned during the second semester of my senior year.  I  was “art-challenged” and had a strong case of senioritis so I refused to do it and dared him to flunk me for the quarter.  He did.  My senior high school report card consisted of all A'a and a single F.  I think I learned a more important life lesson from the F than I did from all of the A's combined.

AT&T just reduced the price of their international data plans today.  I'm going with $49.99 for 125MB, which believe it or not is half-off of last week's rates.   I'm sure in few years we'll be laughing about these plans as we do about our old 30-minute/$30 cell phone plans.  Stories of $1000+ data bills for iPhones traveling outside of the U.S. are not uncommon, so figuring these things out in advance is no small deal.  It took me a little while with customer service because I had to point the rep to the web page with the proper (updated) rates.  Hey, it's AT&T.  At least I managed to finally get it done.

My bags are packed and I'm good to go.  Tomorrow looks like the following:

1:00 pm  PST LAX - DFW
7:50 pm CST  DFW - LHR (arriving 7/20 at 10:45am London Time)
Then on 07/20 2:00 pm  LHR - GVA (Geneva) Arriving 4:40pm
Then connecting  trains to Gstaad.

If all goes well I should be in my hotel by 10:30pm Swiss (Central European) time on 07/20.

Wish me luck!