Category: Travel Stories

Mostly these are written for friends and family.

An actual skier goes to Aspen to ski

by philg

Lifestyles of the Rich and Not-so-famous… a 50-year-old friend who is a good skier reported to our chat group from Aspen. What does it cost to spend a week with the elite? For two parents and two adult children in a rented 2BR timeshare, the basic cost (airfare plus lodging) for mid-March was about $15,000 thanks to his wife, a business genius. If a mere mortal were to arrange this it would be $30,000. “St Regis nearby is $2400 a night, which is not the peak rate.” Note that this trip was booked before the ski season started, so the prices don’t reflect that fact that Colorado had no snow this year.

  • To save time, the family’s tickets were straight into the Aspen airport.
  • Tailwinds too strong for a landing in Aspen, so they are diverting to Grand Junction – that is a 2-3 hour drive
  • 20kt gusting 30
  • These small mountainous airports are bad news
  • And that is why I prefer SLC to all of them
  • But [wife] was hell bent on “trying out Aspen”
  • I have to say the turbulence right now is like on the Katana [Diamond DA20, a paper airplane, basically, in its response to wind]
  • Given the 3:30am wake up call, this trip is going to be a hoot now
  • They will need multiple buses to send this plane full of skiers with their gear
  • My friend used to vacation in Aspen all the time and I remember that he got stuck here because of the weather at least twice. Planes depart SLC pretty much in any weather. One time he was in Aspen with his kids for four days waiting for a flight. Couldn’t get a car rental because everything was rented, car services were all booked.
  • Just arrived in our hotel. 4 hours after landing
  • A guy told [wife] that we were lucky we got to grand junction; People were arriving in Ubers without their bags from Denver

(I personally would have booked a flight into Denver (“mile-high”), spent a night or two adjusting to higher altitude, and then proceeded 3.5 hours by car up to Aspen, 8,000′ above sea level.)

What’s the experience?

  • Aspen is about stopping to ski early because your salesman at David Yurman called you because your diamonds were ready for pick up
  • they definitely do have snow on slopes, just not as much as usual. Better than a good day on the East Coast
  • Ikon passes were $5k for 4 people [lift tickets]
  • [wife] is raving about the Franke coffee machine [in the condo]
  • Skiing is ok. Not as bad as we thought it would be. Icy at the bottom. Not crowded.
  • It is kind of a small mountain. Snowmass and Buttermilk are nearby but require a shuttle
  • I think I know who likes it: it is guys whose wives don’t ski
  • So they are bored in all other locations. Here they can go shopping or sit in restaurants. If you have a wife who doesn’t ski and bitches at you, then she will drive you nuts in Utah.
  • Women are visibly prettier.
  • too few slopes. They arent bad but Snowbird is a lot better
  • [daughter] just ran for 40 minutes at her usual pace here and said that it was noticeably harder because of the altitude

How about the elites?

  • Very few non whites. [quoting wife] “I just saw my first Asian just now. She was with a white dude, so the type that wants to be white”. Racism and stereotyping are rampant here
  • You have people dressed in furs on the top of the mountain – they actually dress up and go up there with their shopping bags
  • [wife] grabbed our skis from the valet and some woman in the elevator looked at her and said “why are you moving your own stuff…?” Implying that bell staff is supposed to bring it all to our room. We are clearly not used to the luxury lifestyle. These time shares are all run like hotels.
  • You should see some of the houses being built on the hills here. Like the Hamptons
  • Speaking of well-to-do people… Aspen sucks overall. all these dressed up people get old pretty quickly. restaurants are very nice but that’s the only advantage. after i ski all day, i really want to just be in bed or order in. we ordered in twice already.

Getting back home:

  • Aspen airport doesn’t disappoint on departure. We have been sitting on the ground for an hour because of “quite a few arrivals”
  • Embraer is being thrown around by rising air like a Diamond Katana
  • Honestly, I think Aspen is beyond overrated

Final answer?

[wife] might disagree but I think Aspen sucks. Definitely not for you guys. Since you don’t dress up in furs and blow $1k for dinner “to see and be seen”. I was moderately connected to these people and still am to some extent as you saw from my friend’s photos for example, but I don’t go to their parties, which are boring as f*ck. Regarding skiing Aspen is overall inferior to Utah and Vail. Not because all runs suck – there are a few good ones, but overall it is way too small. It is for a green/blue run crowd and has some harder ones so that experienced people can feel that the vacation didn’t totally suck. It is mostly about the town. This is literally it. I think one can cover this entire map in one day of skiing.

What if you wanted to live with dignity in Aspen? “A Robert A.M. Stern-Designed Home on Aspen’s Red Mountain Asks $70 Million” (WSJ):

Frederic “Rick” Bourke, the co-founder of the Dooney & Bourke accessories brand, is putting his Robert A.M. Stern-designed home in Aspen, Colo., on the market for $70 million.

Completed around 1993, the roughly 11,000-square-foot, seven-bedroom house is built horizontally along a rock face on Red Mountain, with tawny-beige stucco walls set atop a native sandstone base.

Bourke acquired the roughly 3.5-acre Aspen property in the late 1980s. The lot sits high on Red Mountain, about 800 feet above downtown. He asked Stern to design a family home there.

[from the big house to The Big House] Bourke’s neighbor in Aspen was businessman Viktor Kozeny. In 2009, Bourke was convicted of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for engaging in a scheme with Kozeny to bribe Azerbaijan government officials. Bourke spent almost a year in prison starting in 2013.

Here’s the VFR chart for the airport, a 8440′ and surrounded by mountains high enough that the FAA says not to fly below 14,600′ (you could still hit a mountain, though, with an altimeter reading of 14,600′ in the winter because the Earth’s atmosphere contracts in the cold and the true altitude is lower than what is indicated):

Airlines have a custom RNAV (RNP) N Runway 15 that supposedly takes them down to about 540′ above the runway before they need to be able to look out the window and see. The lowest approach available to general aviation, including the elites in their private jets, requires the pilots to see the runway when 2100′ above it (up to 91 knots approach speed; Cessna or Cirrus) or 2400′ above (91-120 knots; a lot of rabble-class bizjets) or 3200′ above (121-140 knots; the Big Iron for the Big Shots). This is actually more restrictive than ordinary visual (VFR) flying, which can be done with a ceiling of 1000′.

(In the plate below, notice that the approach features a second localizer that isn’t associated with any runway. This provides guidance for the missed approach. Imagine the consequences, especially in the pre-GPS days, of the obvious mistake of failing to switch the frequency or of forgetting how to use the back course of a localizer, something that the typical instrument-rated pilot might do in training and then never again.)

There’s also a GPS approach that has similar minimums for jets:

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Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas

by philg

As Women’s History Month comes to a close, let’s look at a February visit to the Pinball Hall of Fame, on the Strip in Las Vegas.

This is essentially a big warehouse filled with old arcade games, indifferently maintained and many powered off. That said, it is a large enough collection that there are probably some playable games within that you’ve never seen and never played.

Here’s a supersized Flintstones machine from 1994 that is better as a concept than as a game:

A prototype machine for squirrel-hating golden retrievers… Goin’ Nuts:

Speaking of hate and haters…

Those who appreciate fruit crate art will like this 2015 retro Stern Whoa Nellie!

Machines are priced at whatever their original price was, e.g., some as low as 25 cents and quite a few at 50 or 75 cents per play.

Let’s close with a 1995 Gottlieb Strikes ‘N Spares machine, dressed up in Big Lebowski garb.

Tip: Get there right when it opens if you want to be able to hear the machines’ callouts and music clearly. Don’t be put off by the surly ladies who run the place! (I’m not sure why they’re there because one of them said that she didn’t like pinball and never played any of the machines.)

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San Francisco Bay Area Trip Report III

by philg

In order to avoid what Google Maps said would be a very un-rapid rapid transit ride, I Ubered into San Francisco on a Sunday morning to meet a friend for dim sum in Chinatown.

If you get something at one of the take-away places, there is a nice patio above the Rose Park Station at Stocktown and Washington St. where you can eat it. After Chinatown, we walked to the City Lights bookstore:

We didn’t prepare by reading A Black Queer History of the United States, unfortunately, but enjoyed a visit to the USS Pampanito (a couple of days later, a U.S. submarine sunk an Iranian frigate).

“Essential” marijuana is available down by the water, right next to the In-N-Out Burger that was closed by authorities for its refusal to demand vaccine papers (remember that California marijuana stores were open for the entire 18-month period during which schools were closed):

Transportation variants:

Then back to Berkeley for coffee the next morning:

To be continued…

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San Francisco Bay Area Trip Report II

by philg

Moe’s Books (Berkeley) moved all of the Gaza books to the back of the store (see A trip to Berkeley, California (November 2024))

Some of the books that were prominently displayed:

Nearby Mrs. Dalloway’s Books features works on how to spend most of the day reminding kids that they’re going to die when the Earth goes Full Venus:

I talked to a professor of adolescent medicine shortly after seeing these books and he said that it made sense for all teenagers to be in therapy because of their reasonable fears regarding climate change.

Housing is a human right, which means either a $3 million house from this real estate agency or sleeping in the real estate agency’s alcove:

Dove soap is too precious to be left on the shelf at CVS:

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San Francisco Bay Area Trip Report I

by philg

Flying over Yosemite from Las Vegas…

… we landed in Concord, California, rode on “Transforce” tires, were admonished to “Coexist” with people of different religions, and arrived at a Thai restaurant with an all-gender restroom:

The next day it was time to visit Berkeley, California. A house in my hostess’s neighborhood celebrates RBG, who refused to hire Black law clerks, and Black Lives Matter:

Although everyone I talked to in Berkeley agrees that taxation in California should be higher, there is no “Repeal Proposition 13” sign on the fence of this house worth $2.4 million and taxed at $1.3 million (referenced to its 2006 purchase price). Nor are any of the Californians who said they wanted higher taxes and that they hate generational wealth (unearned!) working to implement a 16 percent state death tax in California to match estate tax rates in Maskachusetts, New York, and other progressive states.

Two yards over, “Free Palestine” (this was a day before Donald Trump attacked the peaceful Iranians so the signs in support of the Islamic Republic hadn’t gone up yet):

Outdoor masking is common and so is wearing an “I’m gay” t-shirt, but it was relatively rare to find an intersection:

Californians love to brag about being rich and also say that housing is a human right, yet are happy to walk by neighbors who live in tents:

Californians also love to brag about their commitment to environmentalism, yet driving old cars that spew pollution is common. (Note that the owner of the 40-year-old Mazda 323, ChatGPT-estimated value of $1,000, was concerned about theft.)

Gasoline is $5/gallon:

Those who’ve converted to electric install tripping hazards on the public sidewalks:

To be continued…

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Las Vegas report

by philg

Last month I stayed with friends near the north end of the Strip, near the new Fontainebleau Las Vegas (a $3.7 billion Florida export with a tortured history). The view from their terrace (note the Sphere towards the right):

They showed me the Las Vegas Arts District, usually bypassed by tourists who go from the Strip to Fremont Street. If you’re walking from the Strip you’ll pass by a dangerous area where you could lose half of your current assets and 50-80 percent of your income going forward:

The City of Las Vegas welcomes visitors from Maskachusetts with a billboard for healing essential marijuana:

Frida Kahlo dispenses advice, e.g., “the best way to succeed in a field is to have sex with a married man who is already successful in that field.”

After our light dinner at Ada’s, a gracious “goodbye” with the Fontainebleau in the background:

The Hunter Biden tour that I’d started at Sheri’s Ranch in Pahrump continued with a visit to the Crack Shack:

From there we continued driving to the Pinball Hall of Fame, which has an awesome sign:

The collection could use some maintenance help, unfortunately, and the ladies who were working there during our visit were not cheerful ambassadors for the passion. That said, there are some unique games to try out. I’ll do a separate post about this place.

We stopped by Atomic Motors to look at classic cars being maintained and offered for sale.

(I’d love to have the 1964 Chevrolet Chevelle Wagon if A/C could be retrofitted! Also, note the rare 1974 Jensen-Healey JH-5, above, at $29,000 with 81,000 miles (how did they get the British-made thing to run that far?). It is tough to imagine today, but the British were once significant innovators and manufacturers of cars!)

Dinner was at Endo, a Tokyo-quality you-gotta-text-and-be-invited omakase restaurant with six seats, three chefs, and two servers.

What did it cost? I’m afraid to ask, but fortunately my host paid. I don’t think that it was cheap, however, because the sake pairing, which I declined because I’m not sophisticated like James Bond and can’t appreciate sake, included a bottle that retails for $550:

The one disappointing aspect of the meal was that nobody expressed concerns about the U.S. economy. I was fully prepared to respond, “I share your anxiety. In fact, I don’t know where my next slice of A5 Japanese Wagyu is going to come from.”

We visited Red Rock Canyon, which is now so crowded that reservations are required but at the same time not crowded enough for the Federales to build a real bathroom in the middle (and maybe a restaurant?):

A school group of perhaps 60 kids was visiting at the same time. Out of the 60, I noticed 1 white girl (“it’s not a replacement”).

We hit Din Tai Fung inside ARIA for late lunch and then enjoyed the Chinese New Year decorations:

Then I walked through Caesar’s Palace, riding the circular escalators (a Mitsubishi innovation):

I saw Wizard of Oz at The Sphere. It’s been extended visually to fill the massive screen and cut down in time to 1:15. Massive fans simulate the tornado. I wasn’t a huge fan of the movie, but the Sphere experience is worth $150 (Sections 205 and 207, close to section 206, are probably the best value. The 100-level seats can be partially covered. Legroom is tight.). The Uber pickups and taxis aren’t handled all that smoothly so it might make sense to walk to the monorail or back to the Strip rather than getting caught up in the crowd.

I finished the trip with a walk through Fontainebleau, but was underwhelmed by the public spaces. There seems to be more to look at in Bellagio or Wynn.

Where should a person of means live in Las Vegas? They’re building some new apartment complexes near the Arts District that will likely be fun for the young and childless. According to my friend, Summerlin is where people with families or who don’t tolerate urban grit will want to be.

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Pahrump, Nevada report

by philg

My friend wanted to go to Death Valley so we landed at 74P, the Calvada Meadows Airport. A couple of enroute snapshots and then the PC-12 on the ramp, such as it is:

The runway is smooth, but narrow, and there is a fair amount of loose gravel on the ramp. Due to the 4,080′ length combined with hot+highish, very few jets could operate here. That said, it is much better than the National Park Service-maintained airports in Death Valley! (see Why do we have trouble maintaining infrastructure if we’re richer than ever? (Death Valley examples)) On the third hand, there is no security so it might be smarter to leave a high-end plane a KHND and do a bit of extra driving.

Enterprise in Pahrump is awesome and came out to fetch us far faster than the airport folks could bring over a fuel truck. Navigating to the most famous Pahrump establishments is challenging because Google Maps at first claims that they don’t exist:

If you need energy before meeting your friend Hunter at Sheri’s Ranch and want to celebrate Kilmar Abrego Garcia, stop at Tina’s Tamales for pupusas (“Abrego’s actual statutory withholding claim hinged on his claim his mother ran a successful pupusa business, which drew Barrio 18’s (criminal) attention”). It’s next door to Enterprise:

(the French bakery in town is also good, but is comically slow (30-45 minutes to make a sandwich) so don’t go there for anything unless it is premade or you’ve called ahead)

If you take the longer northern route to or from Las Vegas you’ll pass the Nevada Test Site for nuclear bombs (especially for “peaceful uses” of nuclear bombs, as demonstrated by the entirely peaceful Iranians, recently the victims of unprovoked aggression):

Related:

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University of Texas, Austin report

by philg

I visited University of Texas’s Austin campus last month. They seem to have about $10 billion in physical infrastructure, $20 billion in the bank, and the ability to tax 32 million people any time that they want more money. It is tough to understand how private universities, except for Harvard and the other Queers for Palestine League schools, can compete.

The buildings are beautiful and beautifully maintained.

First stop was the Ransom Center, home to a Gutenberg Bible and the Niépce Heliograph (1827), perhaps the earliest surviving photo. The special exhibit was of a collection of Saturday Night Live and related memorability from Lorne Michaels (a.k.a. “Lorne Lipowitz”):

In reviewing the memos among NBC network executives and producers, it is remarkable how many of them had Jewish last names. That era is apparently over. From “The Vanishing” (2023):

… a decade ago there were 22 Jews on The Hollywood Reporter’s annual list of the Top 50 Showrunners. In 2022, that’s down to 13. Other than the half-Jewish (and already famous) Maggie Gyllenhaal, you’d have to go back six years to find a single Jew on Variety’s annual list of 10 Directors to Watch.

Thanks to the odious new Hollywood house style that requires a detailed ethnic and racial classification at the top of all capsule biographies, we can see just how many self-identified Jews are in the Sundance writers and directors labs, or the NBC, Paramount, and Disney writers and apprenticeship programs—it is zero. It seems not being Jewish is actually a primary qualification. So much for Jewish control of Hollywood.

The school got some of Bill Gates’s money before it was all shipped to Africa (all without ever being taxed, since the appreciated stock was given to a tax-exempt foundation) and Sol LeWitt managed to harvest some of it.

I visited a friend on the faculty whose door is adorned with a diversity and inclusion sticker:

The publicly-funded school apparently sponsored a “Women and Gender Minorities in Computing Research Day”:

I don’t understand how this is possible at a taxpayer-funded school that is supposed to comply with the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. It wouldn’t be acceptable to have a “men-only” computer nerdism day, right?

I don’t understand why these ardent Democrats stay in Texas and pay taxes every day to a government whose principles, e.g., abortion care restrictions, they say they oppose. Maybe it would be a step down in status to take a job at a Cal State university, for example, but wouldn’t that be a moral upgrade?

Speaking of morals, an on-campus church reminds visitors that “atheist” and Rainbow Flag worship are part of a “Christian community”:

The haters across the street at the business school falsely claim that “The family is the foundation upon which the world of business is built, and it is a vital force in the local, state and national economy” and hatefully display an apparent cisgender heterosexual couple with their artisanally-produced child.

Speaking of false claims, folks at UT reject the false claim that SARS-CoV-2 has been defeated. Outdoor maskers was reasonably common:

The university includes its own art museum.

The restrooms are for “everyone”, but non-Latinos need not apply for inclusion in a significant-sized gallery:

It’s an established fact that Asian women are victimized be being “fetishized” and “undervalued”:

Black Americans are victims of “continued injustice and violence”:

(The King of Hate (Grok) says that more than 90 percent of the murderers of Black Americans are… Black Americans (source: FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program).)

The 2SLGBTQQIA+ community is victimized and “marginalized”. Sign: “Neel painted Bourdon and Battcock, two well-known New York art critics and a romantic couple at the time, in an era when very few people were openly gay in the United States.” In other words, they were hated so much that they were forced to make a living by getting checks from publishers for their opinions about art and they were denied the opportunity to work in a widget factory. According to Wikipedia, Gregory Battcock “was murdered at his vacation home in San Juan, Puerto Rico on December 25, 1980. The murder remains unsolved”. The marginalization of David Bourdon was so extreme that “he served as an editor at Life from 1966 to 1971, associate editor at Saturday Review from 1972 to 1974, senior editor at Geo from 1981 to 1983, and senior features editor at Vogue from 1983 to 1986. He was also The Village Voice’s art critic from 1964 to 1966 and 1974 to 1977.”

Migrants are celebrated with a larger-than-life statue: “Border Crossing is a tribute the artist’s grandfather and to the determination of the thousands of immigrants who have traveled across the southwestern border in search of a better life.” From the artist: “People talked about aliens as if they landed from outer space, as if they weren’t really people. I wanted to put a face on them: I wanted to humanize them” (isn’t it the very humanity of immigrants that makes them destructive to the American working class? Because they’re human they compete for housing, jobs, and welfare dollars)

University of Texas, Austin acknowledges that it is on stolen land, but refuses to give the land back and pay rent to the rightful indigenous owners who were “violently displaced”:

The “Oil Field Girls” who are “most likely working as prostitutes” (1940) seem to have dressed much more modestly than today’s Instagram creators!

For those who want to celebrate Maryland’s leading citizen, pupusas are available on campus:

(Kilmar Abrego Garcia claimed asylum on the basis that his mother’s pupusa recipe had resulted in gangs targeting him for death.)

Circling back to the first question… how does a private school of higher ed compete with University of Texas? The Gutenberg Bible alone might be worth $150 million.

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Brightline to Orlando review

by philg

Loyal readers may recall The Brightline experience (low-speed high-speed rail in Florida).

I recently took Brightline to Orlando. The West Palm Beach station is smaller than the one in Miami, but has better views.

The premium lounge is well-stocked with booze and food:

(Note cranes in background as West Palm Beach continues to be inflated with $billions.)

We hit 125 mph on the final stretch toward Orlando, the only completely new track on the route.

It’s not quite as comfortable as the Chinese high-speed rail, but there is much less jostling than on Amtrak Acela.

My meeting was for dinner at BACÁN, within the Lake Nona Wave Hotel.

The hotel is within a large business district that I had never heard of and that is the home of the Evil Empire (from a small airplane pilot’s point of view):

Would I take Brightline or Orlando again? It doesn’t make much sense for a family and takes longer than driving from Jupiter (partly because one has to drive south for 25 minutes to the station before heading north), but for a single traveler who will fly out of Orlando and then later return to a different airport it is awesome. It will make more sense if they can ever get a station built in Stuart, Florida, which is to our north.

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Austin, Texas barbecue and pinball updates

by philg

In our continued celebration of Women’s History Month, let’s look at two areas where Americans identifying as “women” have been trailblazers: barbecue and pinball machine design and engineering.

Loyal readers may remember Austin and Lockhart, Texas: 10 barbecue restaurants in 72 hours. We had a good meal at Terry Black’s on a recent visit to Austin, but it wasn’t as great as we remembered. We tried Loro, an Asian-inflected bbq place, and thought it was okay (great sides, though!). The new favorite: LeRoy and Lewis. This isn’t an adventurous choice since the place is Michelin-listed. By the late afternoon they’d run out of brisket, but I preferred their tri tip steak anyway. The Frito pie side is perfect if you haven’t joined Ozempic Nation yet.

In addition to improving our waistlines via at least one bbq meal per day, we improved our minds with pinball. The Austin Pinball Collective is an interesting group of enthusiasts who park their 85 machines in an office building and hold an open house every Saturday during which the rabble can pay $20 for unlimited play. Members remain responsible for maintaining the machines that they place into the location so I’m not sure that it qualifies as a big convenience upgrade compared to having a machine in one’s house. It would be a lot easier on the members if the collective hired a part-time or full-time tech for the machines.

At the collective, we learned that Texas is slowly catching up to Chicago as a pinball machine design and manufacturing center. There are currently three companies in Texas building machines and there was an example of each at the collective:

Barrels of Fun seems to be the most established of the three. Their Labyrinth machine is kind of fun, but their Dune machine is the most beautifully lit pinball machine that I’ve ever seen. (You can play Dune in Minneapolis at the all-white pinball bar that I visited (consistent with my general observation that there was no mixing among native-born white Minnesotans and the Somalis whom they claim to love).)

A pre-flipper Stock Market machine, a Mars machine in case Elon Musk drops in, and one for Muhammad Ali fans.

Our other brain-enhancing stop was at Pinballz (original location on Research Blvd.) to play Hercules, a massive Atari machine with a ball the size of a pool ball.

The game is indeed quite slow. Despite the ponderous size, the game isn’t very heavy and it is possible to move it enough to influence the ball’s trajectory. Comment from Pinside: “The novelty is cool, but wears off quickly, and then there is not much left. It’s like the woman with the big tatas but no personality. OK, maybe that’s a bad example, because that novelty doesn’t really wear off.”

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