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{ Category Archives } Travel

Outer Banks

Apologies to those of you whom I scoffed at when you told me you could surf North Carolina’s outer banks. I was wrong, you most certainly can! I recently visited Kill Devil Hills, NC with some buddies from high school and enjoyed some damned good food and good beaches and wind and waves. I watched […]

Still happy with my 2006 Prius

My trusty 2006 Prius is still going strong. On a back from North Carolina’s Outer Banks I managed to average 54.2MPG over 336 miles (admittedly mostly highway miles and it was nice enough to need neither AC nor heat). Changing the HID Zenon D4R bulbs was much easier than I expected as well. $28 for […]

Wow – visualizing the massive scale of global shipping is interesting

We live in amazing times indeed where planetary shipping can be visualized like this… Created by London-based data visualisation studio Kiln and the UCL Energy Institute

Trip to Rome, Italy (May 15-22)

May 15th: The train from Naples was pretty uneventful, and the countryside is beautiful. Raining in Rome, cab to hotel was cramped, but only 25 Euros including our bags. Wait a second, for the less than 1 mile trip, that’s pretty extortionate pricing… but it was raining… Hotel Solis is quaint… meaning 1968 called and […]

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Trip to Sorrento, Italy (May 9-15)

Sorry it has taken so long to publish the second installment of the Italy trip, work has been pretty challenging for a solid month and is finally getting tamed down again. Our train from Venice to Rome was full of American tourists and honeymooners from Venice to Florence; then became less crowded approaching Rome where […]

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Trip to Venice, Italy (May 5-9)

May 5th: Wow, British Airways owned Boeing 777 planes are amazingly quiet; you can actually have a normal conversation and I did not need my canalphones to block out the noise of the jet engines. The seats seemed a little wider too; perhaps 19″ wide instead of 17″ – and that two inches makes a […]

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TSA has crossed the line and needs to be curtailed a bit

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” That […]

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Renting Hybrid Cars

This is an interesting article about how to avoid the high surcharges car rental companies charge if you want to rent a hybrid car: How to Get Cheaper Hybrid Rentals (Bucks column at NY Times) It’s sad that market economics are preventing the right thing from happening in the rental market right now.

Avoiding the trap of Breezewood, PA

Many of my friends drive regularly to Western Pennsylvania, and one of the more common routes is to follow I-70 to Breezewood, PA where they are forced to run the gauntlet of dozens of sleazy, crappy, tourist trap food vendors to get on I-76/I-70 to continue West. It happens to also be about 1/2 way […]

Weekend in New York with La Belle Compagnie

We had a lovely weekend museum hopping in New York with La Belle Compagnie and enjoying the hospitality and cooking of Deb and Steve. The museum hopping started at The Morgan Library and Museum where we got to see a Magna Carta on display. We spent a lot of time perusing the digital archive of […]

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