Friday was basically just a travel day. We had an early wake up call in order to catch the 5:10 Heathrow Express from Paddington. The train journey, transfer to terminal 4, check-in, security, boarding, etc. all went smoothly. We were a little delayed as we deplaned at least one passenger for reasons that are entirely unclear and then had to conduct a security sweep of the cabin and off board their checked luggage. The flight was otherwise smooth and mostly empty on Qatar’s giant A380, which is a plane that I have always enjoyed flying on. It was also the first time on Qatar Airways, which worked well despite our lack of status and flying economy — nothing special really, but totally competent.

Arrival in Qatar was equally smooth. We were actually only a few of the handful of passengers to actually enter the country from our flight — most were simply transiting here to another flight. Thus, no real waiting at immigration, baggage claim, or for a taxi to our hotel. Nice!

Speaking of our hotel, I booked us into the Marriott Marquis City Center. Due to my status and lack of guests, we were upgraded to a very large, top-floor, 2 bedroom suite (good), but we lost access to the washer/dryer combo (bad) that I’d planned on using in the 1 bedroom residence unit that I did book. The hotel was attached to a large though not luxurious mall, which was actually practical for us throughout our time in Qatar and gave more of a sense of local life (which for the vast majority of residents probably doesn’t involve double parking their Rolls in the valet line to dash in to pick up their new Patek Philippe).

We ate dinner at a place called the Twisted Olive on the ground floor of a nearby office tower. It had excellent reviews, served breakfast all day, but seemed dubious when almost nobody else was there in the evening. nonetheless, we trusted the reviews and were very pleased with our respective meals that were quite wide ranging (I, for example, had an Asian-inspired version of hot chicken and waffles with the waffles substituted for French toast — delish!).

On Saturday, we grabbed breakfast in the Marriott’s Executive Lounge and then took an Uber to the majestic—truly swoon-worthy—I.M. Pei designed Museum of Islamic Art. It was an interesting look at various forms and expressions of art across the Islamic world over the centuries. From their, we taxied to the Place Vendome Mall, which was a fairly typical mix of (mostly) high-end international retail brands and a variety of global dining concepts that seem to make up Middle Eastern malls. To that end, we ate at Eataly (a sort of mid-to-late afternoon “linner”) and bought some Birkenstocks. After sundown (when it was cooler — relatively speaking), we took an Uber to Souk Waqif to soak up the ambience of what was one of the nicest, cleanest, and most interesting souks we have ever visited.

Sunday was our final day in Qatar. We made it a fairly leisurely day with a later than usual start and allowing time to prepare for our evening flight to Hanoi, Vietnam. We thought about going to the modern art museum, but we ultimately settled on visiting the National Museum of Qatar. The NMoQ traces the natural, cultural, and political history of Qatar from pre-modern to contemporary events. Impressions: it’s unsurprisingly a difficult physical environment to live in that’s been heavily influenced by its proximity to the sea, external forces (including the British, Saudis, and Bahrainis) often attempted to control Qatar and its people, and some of those tensions remain to the present (most notably the very big deal—in Qatar, I only vaguely recall the event in US media coverage—of the blockade of Qatar imposed by a Saudi-led coalition starting in 2017).

Departing from Qatar was an easy journey through the airport despite my lack of status / premium seats and equally uneventful aboard a fairly full Qatar Airways B787 (first time for L&E on that aircraft type. The flight departed around 8pm and being both fairly short relative to our later than usual bedtime and filled with small, screaming children wasn’t especially restful.

All in all, glad to have visited Qatar and added this country to our list.

Today,’s box score: +1 country (Qatar)

Days 1 & 2 were really all about the journey, having left home around 7:00am on Tuesday morning and arriving at our hotel around 8:30pm on Wednesday night. Given a good deal for miles on DeltaOne, we flew to Shanghai up front, which was a real treat for the gals (despite it being in one of Delta’s old 777 cabins before adding the suites).

I also booked us a 1 bedroom suite at the Marriott City Centre. Very nice room. This also proved to be a wise decision as some of us could sleep while others used the living room.

The transfer from airport (usual dystopian environment after spending half a day on a plane) to the hotel was very smooth. After dropping off our luggage, we went to Starbucks for a coffee and headed out to the neon lights of Nanjing Road to find some dinner (ate some really good, spicy Sichuan dishes).

The big challenge with this journey is getting onto the right sleep schedule. Emerson suffered the worst, as she got the best night’s sleep on the way over. Libby and I managed to fall asleep by 2 or and were up again by 6 or 7 (after a pretty restless night). Emerson didn’t sleep at all.

Day #3, which was Thursday, started with complimentary breakfast at the executive lounge (a great perk of my Marriott lifetime status). We then returned to the room and let Emerson sleep for about 3 hours before waking her up (really unwelcome!) and heading out for the day.

We didn’t do too much on Thursday — explored the area around The Bund & People’s Square and visited the Shanghai Museum. Honestly, our main mission was fighting exhaustion and staying awake during the day. Dinner was less successful this night–not that the food was bad. It’s just difficult to enjoy a meal on the verge of collapse. Indeed, even walking back to the hotel a few short blocks felt like a struggle.

We did have one of the funnier moments of the trip at the restaurant. The wait staff didn’t speak English. But, our waitress really wanted to ask us a question. When we didn’t understand the Chinese (despite speaking it too us more loudly), she got a piece of paper and then proceeded to write the question down in Chinese for us (as if that was likely to help). LOL

Thankfully, the Internet came through with real-time translation. Thus, we established that Emerson did not want ice in her water. And, as it turned out, she didn’t want the water either since it was “with bubbles.”

We were all fast asleep by 8:00pm or so.

Day #4 started early… I was up at one o’clock in the morning, and the girls weren’t too far behind me a couple of hours later. Today was our visit to Shanghai Disneyland. I booked our tickets online (quite cheap compared to US prices) and paid a bit more for early access to the park. This paid off as we were able to do many rides (some twice) first thing in the morning and then spent the rest of the day at a more leisurely pace moving around the park.

We had a late lunch at a Wolfgang Puck’s in their version of Disney Springs, called Disneytown. We also did some shopping there and had salted custard egg bao from Crystal Jade.

We left the park around 5:30 and made it back to the hotel by around 7:00 (traffic was heavy). Emerson fell asleep in the car, despite our best efforts to keep her up. We then fell asleep in the car, despite our best efforts to keep each other awake. Dinner consisted of snacks from the nearby convenience store, as we mostly just wanted to go to bed.

Day #5 saw us awake fairly early, which enabled us to grab coffees and a light breakfast at 6am. We then relaxed for a bit before heading out on a dumpling tour and class, which started at 10:30am. This was a blast. The food tasted excellent (the pan-fried soup dumplings were especially revelatory), and the dumpling-making class was a lot of fun too. We also had a nice, small group with us including a New Zealand / South African expat couple living and teaching in Shanghai.

After the tour, we wandered back to our hotel through the French Concession, which felt far more “Upper East Side” than “Midtown” to us. We didn’t see a lot of hotels (at least not big, international chains) in this area, but it looked like a nice spot for eating and drinking (not to mention a short walk to the exquisite dumpling and bao spots). We came upon a market that was oddly celebrating Thanksgiving, as well as a number of historically important sights related to the founding of the PRC (which admittedly were largely meaningless to us).

Dinner was a light meal from room service, as we still had many dumplings in our belly.

Overall, Shanghai was a joy despite our being in a bit of a jet lag induced fog. It’s probably not a fair comparison because I go to Beijing for business, not pleasure, but I personally liked it Shanghai a lot more. We could have probably used one more day to really see the city, but this worked out well. We’d happily come back here.

Today’s just a travel day: Tampa to Atlanta, Atlanta to Shanghai.

Due to the length of the flight and departure time from Atlanta, we left Tampa around 9:45 in the morning, which meant driving to the airport in rush hour. Thankfully, that was the only real “lowlight” of he day.

We boarded our plane in Tampa on time, and Emerson was very pleased to see that we’d secured first class seats. She also quickly tumbled to the fact that that might mean we had first class seats to Asia too. And, she was right! I’d booked us in Delta One on the route over, which was a real treat for the gals.

In Atlanta, we visited the Sky Club before boarding our flight aboard a Delta 777 (sadly one of the planes not yet retrofitted with the Delta One Suites). It’s probably Delta’s worst business class hard product in my opinion, as I prefer even the 767-300s. But, the ladies were happy, which made me happy.

We departed the ship in Civitavecchia at 8:15. We found disembarking to be very easy — it’s one of the benefits of passengers rolling on and off the manifest at most of the ports-of-call. You simply don’t have the mad crush of an entire ship disgorging itself all at once.

We met our driver at 8:25 for the trip to the airport (€150), which took about an hour.

Check-in had a little bit of a queue at British Airways, but it wasn’t too annoying despite my lack of status with the airline. All told, we had to waste about two hours before our scheduled boarding time.

Unfortunately, once we’d boarded the plane, we sat on the tarmac for nearly an hour while they struggled to load and unload the luggage. It seemed they were mysteriously short-handed in the baggage handling department?

The flight was otherwise uneventful, and I managed (finally — they’ve been out on other BA flights) to enjoy one of BrewDog’s Speedbird 100 Transatlantic IPAs (brewed to commemorate the centennial of BA and named, of course, for Concorde).

We were about 45 minutes late into London as a result of the baggage snafu, which further delayed our arrival at our hotel due to increased traffic during rush hour. Nonetheless, we made it to our (very small, otherwise fine) rooms at the Hotel Xenia by around 5:45.

After dropping off our baggage, we left for dinner at The Bolton, a nearby pub with excellent food and beer.

Mom and Emerson had burgers (British beef/cheddar and wild boar/chorizo, respectively). Libby enjoyed the bangers and mash, and I went for a traditional steak and cheese pie:

All in all, this made for a nice “welcome to London” end to our day.

The onward flight to Rome was pleasant enough even in economy class, which admittedly I’ve grown unaccustomed to given my amount of travel for work in business class these days.

A few items of interest…

We flew over the western end of the Himalayas. Since it was day time, nice weather, and the plane had a camera view on its belly, I was able to capture these interesting (to me) views:

Overall, the flight was pretty smooth, but we hit a couple of pockets of light to moderate turbulence. The last bit—about two hours out of Tokyo–made Emerson air sick (a first… though not unheard of for her on a plane or boat). I’ve been there, and I felt bad for her. But, she’s a trooper.

The food was exceptionally good for Economy class on this flight, especially the breakfast. Unfortunately, due to her illness, Emerson skipped the dinner (as did I out of solidarity, I suppose). So, she and I ended up eating (surprisingly good) Caesar salads from a 7-11 in the middle of night after checking into our hotel.

Immigration, baggage claim, customs, getting cash from the ATM, grabbing a taxi, and checking into the hotel were all pretty standard fare and done easily and efficiently. My sense was that we are off to a good start…

It’s like the Rolls-Royce of planes.

And Emirates is no slouch of an airline either — everyone was impressed by the quality of their cabin, inflight entertainment, food/beverage offerings, and level of service.

We departed from our hotel at 7:30am for our 11:30am flight. We arrived in Dubai on time around 8:30pm local time.

Immigration was a little bit of a zoo due to disorganized queues, but we still managed to get through before our baggage arrived. We also successfully picked up our car at Hertz and drove to our hotel, the Marriott Dubai Harbor Hotel and Suites, where we have a 3 bedroom / 3.5 bath suite with balconies overlooking the Palm Jumeirah and the Persian Gulf (all for an insanely cheap rate of <$250 per night):

As seems to be our custom here upon arrival in Dubai, we usually find ourselves eating out rather late at some fairly typical American chain. This trip’s winner: P.F. Chang’s (which I have to admit tasted “so good” to all of us).

It was great (and a little surreal) to be picking them up at the airport in Europe. The plan for the day was to drive to Würzburg, which is kind of the northern gateway to the Romantic Road in Germany. The drive in our sleek, new Volvo V90 station wagon was pleasant, though the car’s technology was mildly confounding initially — even to me. We checked into our hotel (a Mecure — similar to an Aloft) around 11am and received our rooms right away — two very comfortable suites.

We dropped our stuff in the rooms and immediately headed into the center of town (a short stroll along the river and over the Alte Mainbrucke):

We grabbed some strawberries for Emerson (so fresh and succulent!) and proceeded on a walking tour of the city using the local map vs. Rick Steves’ guidebook (the local tour of the old town is more comprehensive, which might be good or bad — we had the time).

Some highlights included…

The Neumunster Basilica:

The old buildings of the University of Würzburg:

The Residenz:

With its magnificent interior (this was an ill gotten photo on my iPhone — I was too smitten with the silver overlay and silver sage walls to resist the temptation):

And its charming gardens:

The Residenz was clearly a highlight:

We had some time after our walking tour before a reasonable dinner hour; so, Libby and I followed another local tradition of having a glass of wine on the bridge. Libby enjoyed a Aperol Spritz (a wine- and aperitif-based cocktail), and I had a glass of the local rose wine (called a Rotling) — both where quite quaffable and got us in the spirit of the local wine festival that was happening.

After this, we headed to a local biergarten for dinner:

All in all, we had a great first day together in Germany, and we came away from Würzburg suitably impressed. Candidly, I picked it as a stop simply because I’d assumed it wouldn’t be too much for a first day and due to its proximity to “what we really wanted to see” tomorrow. But, it turned out to be a great place to visit and somewhere I’d happily return to again.

My meetings having wrapped up yesterday, I departed the Cotswolds around mid-day for my 3:30pm flight to Frankfurt. It was about a 2 hour drive to London Heathrow under cloudy skies with light rain — more typical of English weather than I’d seen during the week (which had been simply gorgeous):

I arrived at LHR in plenty of time to check-in, go through security, and visit the business class lounge before departure.

Unfortunately, my flight ended up being delayed. First, my inbound plane was late to arrive — thereby delaying our boarding time. Once we were all on board, the pilot reported that we had a potential mechanical issue that needed to be checked out. That concern was sorted out, but the delay cost us our take-off slot, which caused us a further delay. All told, I landed in Frankfurt about 2 hours late — not great, could’ve been much worse.

In the meantime, the ladies had managed to travel to Tampa airport, catch their flight to Atlanta, and were a couple of hours away from departing to rendezvous with me in Germany in the morning.

I spent the evening at the oh-so-conveniently located airport Hilton, which was part of a train station/business park complex attached to the airport terminal. The facility included a number of restaurants, and I opted for the “biergarten” (such as it was in an office block):

Really, it’s difficult to go wrong with German specialities and beer.

After dinner, I stayed up until my crew was airborne and headed toward me. Thankfully, they were on-time in departing, and I drifted to sleep while they raced toward me at 500+ miles per hour.

For our final day in Quito, we planned a fairly relaxing day knowing that we’d be flying back home late in the evening (after midnight). Indeed, since we were departing so late and the hotel room was fairly cheap, I opted to keep it for an extra evening to give us a place to relax before departing around 9:30 for the flight.

Our day began with breakfast in the Marriott executive lounge. After breakfast, we walked to the nearby Parque La Carolina, which is home to the Quito Botanical Gardens.

The gardens were lovely.

After visiting the gardens, we stopped by a local shopping mall and browsed the goods on offer. As I mentioned in my previous post, some items (locally produced or cheaply imported) are more affordable here, but I’d imagine one would sacrifice much of the lower cost of living savings in Ecuador if they continued to purchase major American or foreign brand goods that are multiples of the price back home.

After the mall and lunch, we returned to the hotel where Emerson and I went swimming in the lovely, heated pool:

Pretty nice on a cool-ish and windy day at 9,000ft of altitude!

For dinner, we returned to our favorite Crepes and Waffles. Emerson and I shared a delicious dessert:

Unfortunately, the journey home was a little less than ideal. Our already late flight out of Quito was delayed by a late arriving aircraft. The flight was also a bit turbulent due to weather in the Caribbean, making it a little more difficult to sleep on an already short flight. We landed in Ft Lauderdale to be greeted to chaos and delays at immigration, which seemed to be undergoing some sort of renovation. Blah!

Ultimately, we made it to the car and drove home with minimal hassle. I felt surprisingly good despite the lack of sleep. And, all in all, it was a fine ending to what I’m sure will be a memorable trip.