Our quest to visit 7 continents, 100 countries, and all 50 states…
Sep 3rd, 2010 by Paul
At the recommendation of our hood friend, Dick, we had lunch this afternoon at Daniel Boulud’s gastro pub in NoHo. It’s known for its sausages. Very good! It also has an impressive beer and wine list. Dessert was also great — a blueberry and lemon cornbread w/ carmel corn ice cream. Excellent!
See for yourself…
Sep 3rd, 2010 by Paul
We’re at the airport to fly to New York for the weekend. The irony: we’re leaving our home in Florida (a semi-tropical locale in the midst of hurricane season) to go to New York just in time for the arrival of Hurricane Earl. How’s that for timing? 
Jul 16th, 2010 by Paul
Well, I’m finally on my way back to Tampa to remain there for more than 10 hours, unlike my earlier ‘visit’ home this week. This has been a really long week… between travels in/from Europe on Mon-Wed and work/meetings Thur-Fri.
When I sit back and reflect on it, it’s actually fairly amazing that one can be in Slovenia, Croatia, or Italy in the first half of a week, travel back to Florida in a single day, get on a plane a couple of hours later and travel halfway across a different continent — all in relative comfort and safety. In most of the span of human history such a sojourn would have been physically impossible, if not utterly inconceivable. It’s really just amazing. A friend of mine once shared a funny (and ironically true) YouTube clip from Conan O’Brien’s former show of Louis CK pointing out that “everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy.” Such seems to be the paradox and state of the modern human condition. Oh well, I suppose that’s at least good for self-help authors and psychopharmacologists. The economy can use the stimulus in any form, I suppose. 
In any case, I plan to spend my weekend with Libby and Emerson in an entirely unproductive fashion.
P.S. It looks like my flight is delayed due to a problem with the plane: too much fuel. It takes an hour to pump it off. Amazing. Yes. Happy. No.
Jul 14th, 2010 by Paul
We’re currently at the Venice Marco Polo airport, awaiting our outbound flight to Tampa. We should be boarding in about 60 minutes. Disembarkation was very smooth this morning. We took a taxi to the airport, which was both cheap (45 euro vs. HAL’s $79 per person charge) and easy (we went from our cabin on the ship to the airport check-in desk in about 20 minutes).
This will be a full flight with fellow HAL cruisers. I have no expectation of an upgrade out of here today, as the plane appears to be packed. No matter — I’m always very happy to just get an OpUp on one segment (which we’ve been lucky with the past few years).
Ciao for now!
P.S. Here’s a photo of the Alitalia lounge…
Jul 13th, 2010 by Paul
We arrived back in Venice tonight. It’s a very warm and humid evening (getting us ready for home). As we’d been in Venice already and had to pack (etc.), I couldn’t have imagined venturing out into the sweltering, sticky heat.
I plan to write my cruise review on the plane tomorrow and also organize most of the photos for uploading to the web site. This should save a lot of time (unlike last year’s Eastern Med cruise, which has yet to be posted).
The end of this cruise is bittersweet.
On the one hand, it will be great to get back to see Emerson, especially for Libby who’s not used to being away from her for any extended period of time. On the other hand, we (I) finally started to get a sense in the past few days of being ‘away’ and got into a vacation rhythm. Now, we’ll be right back into the mix (indeed, I leave Tampa leave for a business trip within 12 hours of getting home). Arguably, the enjoyment quotient might have been higher had we been away longer… or at least my batteries would have had more time to recharge. We’ll try to address this catch-22 over the next couple of trips by bringing Emerson along.
All in all, we’ve had a good time, added five new countries to the count, and got to spend some quality time together. That’s pretty good for little more than a week!