I've gotten like 12 emails inviting me to "bid to upgrade your seat" on this 55 minute flight where I'm already sitting in row 4. What's even the point?
gimme a chance to upgrade my upcoming 15 hour flight for a hundo and then we'll talk
So, upgrading to seat 1A on a short hop flight came with the usual expected perks: getting to be first one on and first one off, priority tags on luggage so the baggage claim wait isn't too bad, a combination window and aisle seat on the Embraer plane, but the one bonus I didn't expect was that instead of the usual plastic cup, they serve soft drinks in a glass made of actual glass.
It’s 0° C at my home right now. Yesterday we had snow showers all morning. Buds are starting to show on trees, but it’ll be some time yet before leaves emerge.
It’s 20° C in Manchester, England today. Would that I could be in warm, sunny, green Manchester as my trip had planned.
Civics is not a consumer product that you can ignore because you don’t like the options presented.
I made sure to get no-hassle full-refund cancellation on everything, just in case things the vaccines fail and Covid declares that what we’ve seen so far isn’t even its final form and puts us all back into our isolation chambers. I’m pretty much in agreement with this article from Slate: the best time to book is now. Normally, I’d be looking at $150 CDN a night to stay in London, and this time around I paid less than $90. As a whole, I’ll be paying less for this trip in 2021 than I paid for a slightly shorter trip in 2011.
I don’t suggest booking anything before the end of summer, but by fall we’re probably going to be in a place where the US, Canada and EU have fully reopened, and I think that it’s worth making plans now, while they’re cheap, and where you can ensure you can cancel without penalty if things do go wrong.
Civics is not a consumer product that you can ignore because you don’t like the options presented.
I'm hoping that's the case, but for my trying to travel from Taiwan, my costs are double what they usually are. So it's not a sure thing, you'll need to do a little research and figure out which airlines and destinations are gonna be cost-saving.
I'm not even worried about abroad at the moment - I just wanna go camping - strap my tent and panniers on to the bike and cycle out to one of the local campsites.
But they can't open yet - because shared toilets, etc. Fair enough but how come pubs can open their gardens and customers use the toilets from April 12th and yet campsites have to wait till May 17th?? The cynic in me reckons it's because pubs generate a lot more tax revenue than campsites.
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FishmanPut your goddamned hand in the goddamned Box of Pain.Registered Userregular
edited March 2021
I must admit, I'm a little disappointed in our current line of vaccine reporting here in New Zealand. Compared to a lot of the rest of the world, we're quite slow in rolling out our vaccination, and after being world-leading in addressing COVID-19, there's a thread of questioning 'why aren't we doing better at vaccination?' stories and talkback, missing the point that we're down on the vaccination priority list precisely because we're world-leading. Of course we're fucking lower on the list in priority than countries that have uncontrolled pandemics; every day they wait is more deaths. We're behind the coutries that are suffering because it's triage, not because we're incompetent at managing a vaccine rollout. We're just not first on the list, but there's this very NZ thing where we have low-key strong feelings about liking to see our name first on the list.
EDIT: You know, originally I had a line about how the only benefit of vaccination in NZ is restoring our tourism industry, but then it didn't flow, so I edited it out and now my rant has nothing to do with travel and is probably in the wrong thread.
How well, such is pandemic: the longer a thread runs, the more likely all threads will eventually become the quarantimes thread.
JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
Jesus look at all these cobwebs. Sorry, travel thread, it's been a while.
Anyway, my parents are once again threatening to sell their house and buy an RV, so I was shopping for a copy of the Atlas Obscura for Mother's Day. The publication date of the latest edition? October 2019.
Damn, Atlas Obscura, that is an extremely bad beat. I hope things start looking up for you soon.
Anyway, vaccines are happening, the world might be opening back up again before winter. You folks headed anywhere neat?
I think it is very optimistic that Governments will have figured out how to manage vaccinated travelers by winter, let alone before. Also, vaccination progress in the States is much further along that most other places in the world outside of Europe. It hasn't really started at all here in Taiwan, where we have something like a few tens of thousands of doses available and medical staff aren't even close to all being inoculated yet.
That said when ever my fiancee and I do get vaccinated and are free to travel and return without having to sit in quarantine for two weeks after we get back, my first trip will be to Virginia to visit my folks and to get married, and then we will honeymoon in Japan and maybe Hawaii whenever we can scrape together the scratch to do that.
sarukun on
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Lost Salientblink twiceif you'd like me to mercy kill youRegistered Userregular
edited April 2021
I feel reasonably optimistic about a vaccination travel bubble by winter between Singapore and a few other countries in the region.
They're talking again about a HK-SIN travel bubble; I'm not buying tickets yet like i did in the fall but if it happens I AM GONE
Otherwise I should be vaccinated by June and then I'm going home in August because fuck not seeing my family for two years.
Lost Salient on
"Sandra has a good solid anti-murderer vibe. My skin felt very secure and sufficiently attached to my body when I met her. Also my organs." HAIL SATAN
We've been making tentative plans, nothing concrete until countries figure out the protocols for vaccinated travelers. That said, Iceland air has been persistently emailing me deals for the last three months.
The really big trip I want to do is to go back home to see the family, but fuck knows when normal flights to Australia are going to resume. I'm kind of crossing my fingers for 2022.
At this point I’m even starting to miss airports. Just wanna go somewhere.
Unfortunately Brazil is likely to be off the table for quite some time. Maybe once vaccines are more common we can go visit friends around Europe at least.
We've been making tentative plans, nothing concrete until countries figure out the protocols for vaccinated travelers. That said, Iceland air has been persistently emailing me deals for the last three months.
The really big trip I want to do is to go back home to see the family, but fuck knows when normal flights to Australia are going to resume. I'm kind of crossing my fingers for 2022.
Jesus, what the fuck is even the point of vaccinations if I can’t make a journey to the west!?
sarukun on
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FishmanPut your goddamned hand in the goddamned Box of Pain.Registered Userregular
I was hoping for true vaccination passports to bypass isolation restrictions in the near future and a return to some new normal, but no, apparently there's already a roaring trade in forged vaccination documentation because of course there fucking is.
That's unbelievably cool. Your new name is cool guy. Let's have sex.
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JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
edited June 2022
Jesus, this thread was way back in the archives.
Anyway, in a heady spate of optimism during one of the Covid dips, I let my parents talk me into a fabulous European travel package to Vienna, Budapest, and Prague so we could visit one of our distant Czech relatives who got really into genealogy during lockdown. At some point during the pandemic and the war the travel company lost their ability to honor that package, so now we're burning our credits on a crunchy granola package to Vancouver, Whistler, and Victoria just so we don't lose our entire shirts when the company goes bankrupt.
Western Canada seems like as good a place as any to spend a week outside of Oklahoma in late August, so I'm pretty jazzed. There's going to be whale watching and kayaking and an ominously vague eleven hour Whistler Mountains & Adventure tour. It'll be good to get out of the two-and-a-half-year groove I've worn between the Oklahoma City limits and the Amarillo city limits, at any rate. And I paid for it long enough ago that it doesn't feel like actual money at this point!
That sounds neat, but too bad you couldn't make it to Vienna; the churches historical buildings per square foot is impressive. And how they had to cancel building a train rail because they found Roman ruins when they were digging for the tracks. Because that's a thing that happens.
Also weirdly the best McDonald's burger I've ever had.
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JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
Brovid Hasselsmof[Growling historic on the fury road]Registered Userregular
edited August 2022
Where are you going Jedoc? I know Canada but what you up to? Edit - never mind, I somehow missed your post upthread. Enjoy whale watching, if you see humpbacks I'll be really jealous.
I've been considering booking a holiday to La Gomera in the Canary Islands in February, just to escape the grim weather for a bit. But can't decide if I'd actually be happier spending that money on material possessions.
Brovid Hasselsmof on
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Blake TDo you have enemies then?Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.Registered Userregular
I’ll always favour having extra socks over extra shirts.
one of these days I'd like to get a clamshell backpack, but I know I'd pack it Instagram-grade #aesthetic like twice ever and then proceed to be a gremlin
that's probably why I still tend to one-bag pack using a top loading compartment instead, those things are pretty gremlin-friendly tbh
I uh...visited for 3 days like close to a decade ago.
Doubt that helps. Denmark was nice, though.
Also if you're a foodie one of the best (sometimes rated the best) restaurants in the world is there. Will cost a lot and it'll be hard to get reservations, but fyi.
First time going through global entry. This is like customs in the Czech republic in...2007? Which was literally walking through a room with a guy pointing at people asking if they gave anything to declare.
I got to skip an approximately 2 hour line, didn't have to fill out a form, didn't have to get interviewed (but didn't get a stamp ).
Yeah if I think I'm gonna do even a little bit of traveling next year (like...more than a single flight) I'm definitely getting pre-check. That shit seems broken, as the gamers say.
Yeah, the only airline that does direct from Sacramento to where my parents live is United (and fuck layovers).
I should have done this years ago, but the United CC does the whole "free checked bags if booked" yaddah yaddah. One round trip pays for the annual fee in checked bags alone since there's two of us, and you also get other stuff (earlier boarding, passes to the lounge, etc) but one of the perks is they refund global entry (or TSA pre, but global entry includes TSA pre) if purchased using that card, so.... Why not. And yeah, that shit is worth it.
It's an absolute scam which shows how meaningless most of the security is, but yeah.
Who's Danish here? I've been creeping on Denmark in Google earth and now I really want to go to Denmark. It looks nice.
It is nice. Expensive, but nice. "Dear in many ways", I think I've used before. Anything specific you'd want to go for?
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Brovid Hasselsmof[Growling historic on the fury road]Registered Userregular
I mainly wanted to ask what this is https://maps.app.goo.gl/ABxt94o36uBahzMr8. They look too tiny to be houses. Almost like allotments but they're too pretty for that.
I dunno what I'd go for, but it would probably have to be in January or February which I'm guessing isn't the best time to visit anyway.
Everywhere I want to go is expensive
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David_TA fashion yes-man is no good to me.Copenhagen, DenmarkRegistered Userregular
No, those are allotment gardens. In Denmark, there's perhaps less focus on the gardening aspect of allotments and more of it being small summer homes, originally for the working class who didn't have the option of going to the country side.
This is also in Frederiksberg, which is a separate municipality in the middle of Copenhagen and generally known as a more affluent area, so everything is a little nicer.
And yeah, some things would be difficult in January/February. Tivoli, for instance, closes after the 31st of December and isn't open again until April. There's lot of nice parks in Copenhagen, but also not perhaps the best time for it, but still a lot of sights to take in. Lots of museums, Zoo is open year round, I've lived here all my life and I can still just go for walks to take in the architecture. It's a beautiful city.
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Indie Winterdie KräheRudi Hurzlmeier (German, b. 1952)Registered Userregular
currently in the netherlands visiting my sister who's here studying game design
pros - lots of chocolates and gummies that are very high quality and also super cheap
cons - no tampons with applicators or decent scotchbrite, so the jury's still out
for real though, the place feels calm, sedate and satiated
I find it oddly disturbing, like it's all fake or something; I don't understand how any of it works
Like real actual problems are something that happen to Those Other People On The News while you work from 10-12, take a two hour lunch break, and then work from 2-5 before closing up for the day satisfied with your house ownership and comfortable pension
Maybe I'm just projecting here but it rubs me the wrong way
Posts
gimme a chance to upgrade my upcoming 15 hour flight for a hundo and then we'll talk
That, and also the nice mountain views.
It’s 20° C in Manchester, England today. Would that I could be in warm, sunny, green Manchester as my trip had planned.
Well, hello there, travel thread.
I just booked a trip for late October in England.
I made sure to get no-hassle full-refund cancellation on everything, just in case things the vaccines fail and Covid declares that what we’ve seen so far isn’t even its final form and puts us all back into our isolation chambers. I’m pretty much in agreement with this article from Slate: the best time to book is now. Normally, I’d be looking at $150 CDN a night to stay in London, and this time around I paid less than $90. As a whole, I’ll be paying less for this trip in 2021 than I paid for a slightly shorter trip in 2011.
I don’t suggest booking anything before the end of summer, but by fall we’re probably going to be in a place where the US, Canada and EU have fully reopened, and I think that it’s worth making plans now, while they’re cheap, and where you can ensure you can cancel without penalty if things do go wrong.
But they can't open yet - because shared toilets, etc. Fair enough but how come pubs can open their gardens and customers use the toilets from April 12th and yet campsites have to wait till May 17th?? The cynic in me reckons it's because pubs generate a lot more tax revenue than campsites.
EDIT: You know, originally I had a line about how the only benefit of vaccination in NZ is restoring our tourism industry, but then it didn't flow, so I edited it out and now my rant has nothing to do with travel and is probably in the wrong thread.
How well, such is pandemic: the longer a thread runs, the more likely all threads will eventually become the quarantimes thread.
Anyway, my parents are once again threatening to sell their house and buy an RV, so I was shopping for a copy of the Atlas Obscura for Mother's Day. The publication date of the latest edition? October 2019.
Damn, Atlas Obscura, that is an extremely bad beat. I hope things start looking up for you soon.
Anyway, vaccines are happening, the world might be opening back up again before winter. You folks headed anywhere neat?
That said when ever my fiancee and I do get vaccinated and are free to travel and return without having to sit in quarantine for two weeks after we get back, my first trip will be to Virginia to visit my folks and to get married, and then we will honeymoon in Japan and maybe Hawaii whenever we can scrape together the scratch to do that.
They're talking again about a HK-SIN travel bubble; I'm not buying tickets yet like i did in the fall but if it happens I AM GONE
Otherwise I should be vaccinated by June and then I'm going home in August because fuck not seeing my family for two years.
"Sandra has a good solid anti-murderer vibe. My skin felt very secure and sufficiently attached to my body when I met her. Also my organs." HAIL SATAN
The really big trip I want to do is to go back home to see the family, but fuck knows when normal flights to Australia are going to resume. I'm kind of crossing my fingers for 2022.
Edit: well, goddammit
Back to the drawing board
Unfortunately Brazil is likely to be off the table for quite some time. Maybe once vaccines are more common we can go visit friends around Europe at least.
Jesus, what the fuck is even the point of vaccinations if I can’t make a journey to the west!?
Anyway, in a heady spate of optimism during one of the Covid dips, I let my parents talk me into a fabulous European travel package to Vienna, Budapest, and Prague so we could visit one of our distant Czech relatives who got really into genealogy during lockdown. At some point during the pandemic and the war the travel company lost their ability to honor that package, so now we're burning our credits on a crunchy granola package to Vancouver, Whistler, and Victoria just so we don't lose our entire shirts when the company goes bankrupt.
Western Canada seems like as good a place as any to spend a week outside of Oklahoma in late August, so I'm pretty jazzed. There's going to be whale watching and kayaking and an ominously vague eleven hour Whistler Mountains & Adventure tour. It'll be good to get out of the two-and-a-half-year groove I've worn between the Oklahoma City limits and the Amarillo city limits, at any rate. And I paid for it long enough ago that it doesn't feel like actual money at this point!
Also weirdly the best McDonald's burger I've ever had.
Flying out tomorrow let's gooooooo
Glad it wasn't just me.
Well you say that, but socks, underpants, t-shirts, jeans isn't even alphabetical so frankly I'm disappointed.
Unless that’s what dolphin print on salmon is, in which case, nice.
Confirmed, Jedoc is touring with rhcp.
I've been considering booking a holiday to La Gomera in the Canary Islands in February, just to escape the grim weather for a bit. But can't decide if I'd actually be happier spending that money on material possessions.
Dry, warm socks are always a luxury.
Satans..... hints.....
This is pre-9/11 travel.
one of these days I'd like to get a clamshell backpack, but I know I'd pack it Instagram-grade #aesthetic like twice ever and then proceed to be a gremlin
that's probably why I still tend to one-bag pack using a top loading compartment instead, those things are pretty gremlin-friendly tbh
Doubt that helps. Denmark was nice, though.
Also if you're a foodie one of the best (sometimes rated the best) restaurants in the world is there. Will cost a lot and it'll be hard to get reservations, but fyi.
In OTHER news:
First time going through global entry. This is like customs in the Czech republic in...2007? Which was literally walking through a room with a guy pointing at people asking if they gave anything to declare.
I got to skip an approximately 2 hour line, didn't have to fill out a form, didn't have to get interviewed (but didn't get a stamp
My credit card pays for it.
I should have done this years ago, but the United CC does the whole "free checked bags if booked" yaddah yaddah. One round trip pays for the annual fee in checked bags alone since there's two of us, and you also get other stuff (earlier boarding, passes to the lounge, etc) but one of the perks is they refund global entry (or TSA pre, but global entry includes TSA pre) if purchased using that card, so.... Why not. And yeah, that shit is worth it.
It's an absolute scam which shows how meaningless most of the security is, but yeah.
It is nice. Expensive, but nice. "Dear in many ways", I think I've used before. Anything specific you'd want to go for?
https://maps.app.goo.gl/ABxt94o36uBahzMr8. They look too tiny to be houses. Almost like allotments but they're too pretty for that.
I dunno what I'd go for, but it would probably have to be in January or February which I'm guessing isn't the best time to visit anyway.
Everywhere I want to go is expensive
This is also in Frederiksberg, which is a separate municipality in the middle of Copenhagen and generally known as a more affluent area, so everything is a little nicer.
And yeah, some things would be difficult in January/February. Tivoli, for instance, closes after the 31st of December and isn't open again until April. There's lot of nice parks in Copenhagen, but also not perhaps the best time for it, but still a lot of sights to take in. Lots of museums, Zoo is open year round, I've lived here all my life and I can still just go for walks to take in the architecture. It's a beautiful city.
pros - lots of chocolates and gummies that are very high quality and also super cheap
cons - no tampons with applicators or decent scotchbrite, so the jury's still out
for real though, the place feels calm, sedate and satiated
I find it oddly disturbing, like it's all fake or something; I don't understand how any of it works
Like real actual problems are something that happen to Those Other People On The News while you work from 10-12, take a two hour lunch break, and then work from 2-5 before closing up for the day satisfied with your house ownership and comfortable pension
Maybe I'm just projecting here but it rubs me the wrong way