Category: Travel Stories

Mostly these are written for friends and family.

Lightweight luggage review

by philg

We had a strict 8 kg. European carry-on and 23 kg. checked bag limit for our recent cruise. My roll-on bag was 10 lbs. (4.5 kg) empty and a touch oversized for Europe. My 26″ Delsey “super lightweight” checked suitcase was 10.8 lbs. empty.

After doing about two hours of research online (articles in Forbes, for example, and reviews at Amazon), I made the following decisions…

Soft-sided expandable bags rather than hard-shell. If limited to the rolling bag as the single carry-on, it would be awkward to have to crack open the entire hard-shell bag somewhere on the plane to get to a small needed-in-flight item. Also, an expandable soft-sided bag with international dimensions (55 x 40 x 23 cm; a couple of inches smaller than the typical American road warrior roll-on bag) could be expanded for use domestically.

Two wheels rather than the four-wheel “spinner” designs. The two-wheel designs seem to have 10-15 percent more space than a bag with the same exterior dimensions and four wheels. Two wheels will work better over imperfect surfaces, but they will likely be more tiring through the airport. On the other hand, the 23 kg. bag won’t be going far and the 8 kg. bag won’t be very heavy.

After reading everything that seemed relevant, what popped out were the latest Maxlite 5 suitcases from Travelpro, the company that invented the modern suitcase (Condé Nast Traveler). These aren’t the most stylish bags, but why would it be better to have a bag that screams “steal me”? Travelpro makes some bags with superior organizational capabilities, but all of them are heavier than the Maxlite series. Durability for bags that are so light? Travelpro says “We are proud to introduce our new Built For A Lifetime Limited Warranty starting with the Maxlite® 5 collection which covers defects on major components such as wheels, zippers, extension handles and carry handles.” Maybe a heavier bag would be more durable, but why wear out one’s body lugging around a heavier bag rather than buying a new one every 5-10 years?

Specific choices:

These weigh 5.4 and 7.1 lbs., thus leaving 8.3 lbs. of additional capacity compared to my previous bags. Travelpro says that these are lighter than the previous generation Maxlite 4, e.g., about 0.5 lbs. for the carry-on. The cost of both bags together was $237.

How did they work during five flights, two hotels, etc.? Fantastic! It would be nice if they were a bit more compartmentalized, but the high payload to vehicle weight was awesome. They seem to be at least reasonably durable.

[Of course, after all of this work, when we finally did show up for the charter flights there was no verification of the dimensions, weight, or even quantity of bags. Quite a few passengers completely ignored the directives and checked two large bags (for a three-week cruise).]

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Scale under the floor of a cruise ship cabin to reduce buffet consumption?

by philg

The biggest and best helicopter tour operators have scales hidden underneath the floor at the customer service counter. Thus they’re able to quickly capture passenger weights, oftentimes without the customers being aware.

What about the same technology for cruise ship cabins? Put a scale near the door and a display so that the passenger can see his or her current weight. This could reduce costs since a passenger who realized that he or she was gaining 0.5 lbs. per day could cut back at the buffet.

(On our recent Northwest Passage cruise on Hurtigruten, there was no scale in the room and also none in the (small) gym. Due to the challenges of resupplying in the High Arctic combined presumably with people pigging out, the ship ran out of a bunch of items prior to the end of the trip. The poor crew had to go 10 days without fresh fruit. The Germans were not happy that the yogurt had run out.)

Some of our food temptations:

(The French chef, Julien, cannot be held responsible for the poutine. I was the one who pointed out that we needed to celebrate Canada’s greatest culinary achievement and the kitchen crew raided a supermarket in Nunavut for cheese curds.)

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ARKEN: Copenhagen’s contemporary art museum

by philg

Some pictures from a summer visit to ARKEN, a waterfront concrete museum that opened in 1996.

The entrance…

The regular collection is heavy on Damien Hirst…

More exciting… Benedikte Bjerre built an airport conveyor system out of IKEA bed parts (she says “the work addresses our dreams and hopes of the good capitalist life and social mobility across global borders”):

The museum was doing a big show of work by Australian Patricia Piccinini:

Does your dog like to jump up and share the bed?

Can you explain this traffic accident to Hertz?

Is it fair to say that not all concepts for Little Mermaid sequels are successful?

Miscellaneous:

Many of the artists claim to be concerned about “marginalised individuals and groups,” but how many of those folks will ever purchase or view a contemporary artwork?

Exit through the gift shop…

And then fold your big Danish frame into a tiny Danish car…

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Danish kids absent from school for a month

by philg

The two youngest passengers on our Northwest Passage cruise were 13 and 15, public school students in Denmark. I asked the parents what kind of bureaucratic obstacles there had been to taking the kids out of school for a month. “None,” replied the dad. “The teacher said that they’ll probably learn more on this trip than in school.” Hurtigruten’s promise of working Internet on the Roald Amundsen did not materialize due to (a) limited satellite coverage, and (b) inability of the ship’s antennae to point low enough. Had the disconnected children experienced trouble in completing their assignments? “They weren’t given any,” said the father. “The curriculum in Denmark is standardized at the federal level, which can be great, but for children who are stronger than average academically it means they have no trouble catching up if they miss a month.”

[I also learned from this family that Denmark has instituted a busing system for children of immigrants. If a born-in-Denmark child does not speak Danish well, he or she is bused away from the neighborhood school, which presumably will also contain a bunch of children who speak a non-Danish language, to a school full of Danes. Where are these folks from? “Syria, after four straight years as the biggest generator of asylum-seekers in Denmark, lost its crown to Eritrea last year, but this year it is back on course to generate the highest number. … Uffe Østergaard, a Danish university academic specialising in identity history who works for both Aarhus University and Copenhagen Business School, has suggested in a Politiken opinion piece that Europe should build a wall around its perimeter… ” (CPH Post)]

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Northwest Passage cruise begins

by philg

I’m praying for global warming to end… on September 11, on which date I hope to be stepping off the ship that I boarded this morning in Greenland (soon to be our 51st state? Atlantic says that citizens there consume roughly the same amount in aid from Denmark as Federal welfare $$ spent per resident of New Mexico, i.e., $10,000 per year per person).

Here’s our planned route (from Hurtigruten):

I will try to post a bit to Facebook and/or this blog, but Internet access may be tenuous. So that the site does not go dark, I’ve scheduled a bunch of non-topical postings to appear once/day.

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A fifth grader reviews Carnival Cruise to Bermuda

by philg

At a late June birthday party for one of my best 4-year-old friends, a fifth grader mentioned that she had just returned from a Carnival cruise from New York to Bermuda and back.

How was it?

“It got rough on the second day.”

Was anyone seasick?

“There was vomit everywhere,” she replied. “They didn’t have any bags, so people were throwing up on the floor, in the stairways. Everywhere.”

How about Bermuda itself?

“We were there for only 8 hours. The beach was nice.”

Related:

  • Tempted by the above to go farther south?“Why Waves of Seaweed Have Been Smothering Caribbean Beaches” (Atlantic): “In 2018, as seaweed piled up on beaches throughout the Caribbean, it began to rot. Already stinking and sulfurous, the thick layers began to attract insects and repel tourists. The seaweed—a type of brown algae called sargassum—had grown in the ocean and washed ashore in unprecedented quantities. It prevented fishers from getting into the water, and entangled their nets and propellers. It entangled sea turtles and dolphins, too, fatally preventing them from surfacing for air. It died and sank offshore, smothering seagrass meadows and coral reefs. Barbados declared a national emergency.”
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Meet in Washington, D.C.?

by philg

Dear Readers:

Because I like to do everything in the dumbest way imaginable, I will be visiting Washington, D.C. in July.

If you’d like to get together for coffee, perhaps Sunday afternoon, July 14, or Monday early(ish) morning, July 15, please email me (philg@mit.edu).

Venue will be the Conrad hotel near Chinatown.

(I would have preferred to meet at the Capital One café for Pride Month, but I fear that they may have removed their Pride decor (the issue is important enough to be focused on during June, but not for the rest of the year?):

)

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Titanic Museum, Belfast

by philg

Posted on Facebook under “Heard it might be a Boeing 737 MAX on way back from Ireland so decided to take a ship for safety.”:

Could this be the world’s most lavish museum devoted to engineering failure? The science turned out not to be settled, unfortunately. Folks in Belfast do like to point out “She was alright when she left here.”

The museum does disclose how badly the first voyage turned out for most people on board:

This was despite substantial government regulation:

Also despite the latest in wireless communication technology:

Yet the skill of management, engineers, and workers is celebrated:

Is it a bad thing when a country goes from being a world industrial leader to irrelevant compared to South Korea, China, and Japan? Barack Obama says “No problemo:”

Passengers were arbitrarily divided into only two genders:

Not every movie about the Titanic is an unimaginative derivative:

Then, as now, the migration industry was highly profitable for some…

A reminder to be humble…

… considering that the best humans could do lasted less than two weeks against Nature. From notes typed up by a shipyard office worker:

The building is a beautiful work of engineering in itself and includes a gratuitous Disney-style ride:

More: Visit Titanic Belfast

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Disney World Ticket Price Inflation

by philg

Supposedly, the cost of a Disney World ticket has gone up roughly 3.5X, adjusted for inflation, since 1971 (chart).

During a March 30-31, 2019 visit, however, the parks were so jammed that waiting times for popular rides were 90-150 minutes. Using the Disney World app, it was impossible to obtain a same-day FastPass for any of the popular rides. “They’re all sold out at least 30 days in advance,” said a Florida resident season pass holder. “People who are staying in a Disney hotel are able to book them 60 or 90 days ahead.”

I went with a friend who paid up for a Disney VIP guide. He told us that we weren’t seeing a particularly busy day. “The wait times can be 300 minutes on the busiest days.” How crowded would the main streets be? “You won’t see any pavement.” Was the park more crowded because we were there on a weekend? “There isn’t much difference between weekends and weekdays.”

Go early in the morning during the “Extra Magic” hours when only people staying in Disney hotels are allowed in? The line for the roller coaster in Toy Story Land stretched to more than two hours before the park had even opened to the general public. People who said that they got in line at 8:02 am (park opened at 8) were only about halfway through the line at 8:40.

Go in the evening after the kids have collapsed? The app showed that the wait time for the Avatar sim ride was 95 minutes… at 9:58 pm, just before Animal Kingdom closed for the night. Apparently people who are already in line when the park officially closes will get to ride, but only at 11:35 pm after enduring more than 1.5 hours standing in line.

With the guide we were able to get into the FastPass line at every ride, cut through side doors for a few rides, and cut the line for portraits with princesses and other characters. The resulting wait time for rides was about the same as during my 1991 trip to Disneyland, but the overall experience was inferior because the non-rides portions of the park were so crowded that it was tough to appreciate the atmosphere or architectural details. Want to get food or drink? Wait in a 10-minute line at a kiosk or a 1-hour line at an unpopular restaurant.

The guides cost $500 per hour and can tow up to 10 guests around, so figure this adds $320/day per person if the guide is hired for 8 hours per day and there are 8 people assembled in the group. Tickets in 1989 were roughly $60 per day in current dollars (source). With a VIP guide the experience is comparable overall. The wait times for the rides are similar while the rides have gotten better from a technical point of view. Meandering around the park, trying to get a meal, etc., has become far less enjoyable. Let’s say that these pluses and minuses average out. To have a basically comparable experience today, therefore, costs $109 for the park ticket plus $320 for a 1/8th share of a VIP guide = $429 per day per person. That’s 7X the 1989 price.

Plainly the mobs are buying a lot of hotel rooms, food, and souvenirs. But I wonder why Disney doesn’t have “Crowd-hater Days” in each park to capture the market of people who would be willing to pay a lot more to have the 1990s experience. There are four core parks within Disney World. Why not say that every Monday through Thursday one of these parks will be designated “Crowd-hater” and tickets will be sold at whatever price it takes to keep max line length down to 15 minutes? If ticket prices were doubled, for example, I think Disney would actually make more money in ticket revenue since demand should not be cut by more than 50 percent. By using a high price to limit admission to only one park at a time they should still be able to keep all of their hotels filled (tourists who don’t value the less-crowded experience will still go to the other core parks and/or the water parks).

Topiary from the Epcot garden event:

Travel tip: The Swan and Dolphin hotels are run by a competent hotel chain (Westin/Marriott) and are still technically “on property”. Here’s the view from our $215/night balcony room (rates are cheap if they can’t fill these monster hotels with a convention). It is a 20-minute walk to Hollywood Studios or 30 minutes to the center of Epcot. The boat service is loud and slow and was ultimately rejected by my 9-year-old companion. (She wondered why can’t they use battery-powered boats? They are never far from a charger.)

The most outdated structure in all of Disney (Nikon “Darkroom”):

Fair and balanced: Disney gives equal weight to Donald Trump’s favorite restaurant and Elizabeth Warren’s ancestral home.

Three years after a child was killed by an alligator, Disney still doesn’t have signs clearly explaining or depicting the hazard (there is a sign, but a non-Floridian might infer that the lake-related hazard was drowning and could be addressed by watching children):

(See “Disney knew its property had alligators. It caught hundreds before a boy was killed.” (Washington Post))

Readers: Is the Times Square-level of crowding something that should prompt Disney to change its pricing? Or do young people expect to stand in line for hours to get anything good?

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