Month: November 2004

Last bit of travelling goodness from the trip.

1. I’d already been told that, at rush hour time, the trip from Grangemouth to Glasgow and the airport could be a little hairy, so I was planning on leaving at 7. Then I started seeing reports about sub-freezing temps and worries about icy roads and the like (yes, the Brits have perky weather forecasters, too), so I bumped that up even further.

   As it was, no worries. The roads were dry. The traffic was present, but not outrageous. I determined my “wander about and find something interesting” error from Thursday, which was I should have hopped on the motorway and looked for Scottish Heritage signs. I missed, for example, the … um … Falkirk Wheel. Damn.

   For what it’s worth, concerns about finding the rental car return were ill-founded. Piece of cake. Though I had to go inside to check my Ford Mondeo back in; no helpful little Hertz Minions there waiting to greet me.

   Hanging out at Glasgow Airport wasn’t too much of a big deal. I was able to check my bags through to the States, and then did a little shopping at the gift shops (burning some extra cash). Picked up a few cute things for Katherine, many of them cow-oriented.

   I did find that I was suffering from conversion problems. Prices of £25 look pretty reasonable; realizing afterward that’s more like $46 makes it look a bit less like a bargain-fargain.

2. Regarding airport security, I was never asked to pull my notebook out into a separate bin while going through X-ray. When I set of the alarm at Glasgow (the only time that happened), I wasn’t wanded, I was patted down — very thoroughly and very professionally.

   Only at ticketing did I have to show a photo ID, though my boarding pass was checked several times.

3. Wandering through one of the ubiquitous W.H. Smith bookstores, I discovered:
   • Division of fiction, thematically/by genre, is infrequent. Usually it’s just “Fiction.” Sometimes also “Crime” (which includes what we’d call
     “Mysteries”).

   • The “Current Affairs” book section seems to be mostly “The US Sucks, especially George Bush and those Right-Wing Lunatics” books. Numerous Michael Moore and Al Franken books, but with numerous Brit authors as well. Occasionally leavened by “The US is Making Us All Fat” books.
   • Magazine racks usually had titty men’s mags (of the Maxim sort — FHM in particular, but numerous other). Some slightly harder-core, with translucent wrappers. No displayed nipples on the covers, even there — but not leaving their presence much to the imagination, either.
4. Glasgow Airport is apparently sponsored by the Royal Bank of Scotland, to gather by the large signs for them on all the jetways and terminals. Fortunately, they have a rather attractive logo.

5. I was certainly well-fed on my trip home. Kudos to BA for actually trying to feed us hot food, including an English Breakfast (minus the beans) on the flight down to London, a very tasty chicken-spinach-mushroom-crumbles casserole for dinner on the way out, and a lackluster (but well-accompanied) sandwich a bit before we landed in Denver. Then Margie took me to Brewery Bar III for dinner (yum!), so I certainly didn’t waste away or anything, especially given the number of hours I sat on my ass.

   Real tea-cups on the flights, by the way. No paper or styrofoam. Interesting stirrers over there, too — actual flat paddles, rather than mini-straws.

6. Duty-free at Heathrow — basically Terminal 4 (the BA terminal), beyond security, is one big Duty-Free shopping mall. After all, you have to use the rest of those pound notes, right?

   Cigarette packaging is evidently up to now requiring 33% of the label to be warning — mostly big, plain, black print that says, SMOKING KILLS, though with a few minor variations. Certainly nobody who is literate can claim that they haven’t been warned any more.

   I was sorely tempted to buy and smoke a Cuban cigar, just because. If only I actually smoked …

   Did pick up a couple of bottle of Scotch for Margie — stuff supposedly not sold over here in the States, and actually (remarkably enough) palatable to me: a Macallan Elegancia 1992, and a Dalmore Black Isle 12-yr-old. Both are mild, non-peaty, non-malty, non-all-the-things-I-dislike-about-Scotch.

   Margie seems happy enough with it, preliminary to drinking any of it.

7. Your British word-for-the-day: quango. Used frequently in British newspapers to (judging in context) refer to health organizations and hospital associations. “The Government said that cost-cutting measures would hit health quangos particularly hard.”

8. On the way back, I watched I, Robot, and about two 15-minute segments of Troy. Reviews to follow.

   Also got a chance to watch a bit of a fun road rally, the Wales Rally GB, part of the FIA World Rally Championship. You can have your Formula 1 and NASCAR stuff — I’ll take a good rally race any time. Triffic fun, and my owning a Subaru Impreza (pronouned “Impretsa” by the sportscasters) gave me someone to root for. 🙂

   (I’m actually impressed that Ford is such a presence in the rally world. I had no idea.)

9. We arrived in Denver and pulled up to the gate right at the same time as a KLM flight from Frankfurt, which meant it was a big race to the Immigration and Customs area. Returning internationally to DIA is kind of cool. They pull you up to some special gates in the A-concourse, and then you take a series of pleasant but isolated hallways and escalators, ending up crossing the pedestrian bridge from A over to the main terminal — but a floor up from the one that everyone else takes. Then another set of escalators down and, amidst many signs that electronics may not be used, there you are.

   Since I wasn’t one of the first ones off the plane, I ended up in a fairly long line, but I still processed through in about twenty minutes.

   In answer to someone’s question the other day, yes, the new US-VISIT program is in effect. Everyone (non-US) coming in has to have their own travel papers with the right stuff on them, and provide a digitial imprint of each index finger and a picture.

   Interestingly enough, announcements are made for each flight by, it sounds like, someone from the flight crew (?) down in the immigration area. So we got this very thickly-accented gent from KLM giving announcements first (about which line to get into, what papers were needed, where the restrooms were, etc.), in difficult-to-understand English, which I didn’t think was terribly helpful. Then we got a BA pilot on doing much the same announcements, much more helpfully (“Please be sure to fill out line 10, your destination address here in the US. The folks at the counter will not be very be likely to let you through easily without it”).

   Paperwork passed with no problems. They confirmed how much booze I’d brought back, asked about the “food” I’d checked off (some fudge), and I was on my way after my luggage arrived.

10. Summary of travel entertainment actually used: two books, four chapters of my novel that needed revising, one digital music player, one book of quotations.

    Summary of travel entertainment not actually used: five books, one DVD set (sorry, Doyce), another DVD, one story that needs revising, one gaming module that needs fleshing out, fifteen chapters of my novel that revising.

    Conclusion: I over-packed. Duh.

Two final notes. First off, it was a very good, successful business trip, and one long-overdue. Glad I made it.

Secondly, there was nothing, absolutely nothing as grand about the trip as exiting customs and seeing Margie and Katherine there, followed by much hugging and kissing and enthusiastic welcome-homing.

It’s good to be back.

UPDATE: Margie insists that I note that, after Margie went to the D&D game last night, I got Katherine tucked in, then she got me tucked in, and I was asleep by 8 p.m., ending up with about twelve hours sleep. And, boy, did I need it!