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Old 01-27-2015, 06:45 PM   #21
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Wifey B: Trains and Boats and Planes....don't you just hear the music playing. Oops, no trains. I've never ridden a train. Subway is all. Insert cars in lieu of trains.
Well for your first proper ride do it right. TGV in France, or ICE in Germany or Bullet train in Japan. Favorite way of getting from A to B quickly. Trains are great, and the fast ones are fabulous.

Passenger planes should never have been invented. The whole experience from leaving home to arriving at your hotel sucks these days.

I'm ambivalent about cars as a means of travel as well. Their most redeeming feature is what they replaced. Planes replaced boats - damn them all!
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Old 01-27-2015, 06:47 PM   #22
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Mark said.....I like trains too.
So do I.

I've ridden TGVs in France, ICE trains in Germany, and the super-fast train in China whatever it's called. \My first long distance train ride was on the California Zephyr when I was a little kid and the train still had stewardesses (called Zephyrettes). Rode it with my mom from Oakland to Chicago and then at the end of the summer rode it by myself back to Oakland and then got a plane back to Hawaii

I've driven a train (sort of, see photo), and ridden in the locomotive cab across half of Canada on the now-defunct Canadian Pacific train from Toronto to Vancouver. I like trains a lot.

But..... when I'm in a hurry, as I often am, trains suck, particularly across long distances. They're like cruising in an 8 knot boat. I'll take a plane over a train, no matter how fast the train might be.

We do use something we learned from a train on our boat, however. I don't know if this is still the case, but the trans-Australian passenger train traverses the longest stretch of straight track in the world. Not only that, this stretch goes through some of the most desolate country in the world. To ensure that the driver doesn't fall asleep at the throttle, there is a timer in the cab that has to be manually reset every five or ten minutes (can't remember which). If it isn't reset, when it runs down it pulls off the power and applies the train brakes.

This seemed like a smart idea when we first saw it, so we adapted it to our boat. We use a simple oven timer set to five minutes. When it beeps, whoevfer's driving scans the engine instruments and then taps the button on the timer to restart it. Both my wife's and my flying experience has ingrained instrument scans into us pretty well, but on the water in a painfully slow boat it's easy to get distracted by something, like a whale or whatnot. The timer reminds us to not forget about checking the instruments.
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Old 01-27-2015, 07:01 PM   #23
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It's classic muscle cars for me! 1970 and older to about 1949. They may not be right and they may not be wrong and they may not be the highest tech (unless ya spend 150K on full customization) but they be cool! I have preferences on makes, models etc.
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Old 01-27-2015, 07:08 PM   #24
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Passenger planes should never have been invented. The whole experience from leaving home to arriving at your hotel sucks these days.
Agreed. Commercial airplanes are nothing but metro busses with wings. There is something about being stuck with hundreds of people you don't know in an aluminum sardine can for hours. Flying commercial is like a colonoscopy, unfortunately a periodic necessity.

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Old 01-27-2015, 07:14 PM   #25
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Flying commercial is like a colonoscopy, unfortunately a periodic necessity.

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Depends on where you're riding in the airplane. Fortunately, we always ride up front. Company rule.
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Old 01-27-2015, 07:31 PM   #26
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Depends on where you're riding in the airplane. Fortunately, we always ride up front. Company rule.
Been there done that, and although it helps the 24 hour haul from here to London still sucks, even up front.

I remember talking to the company Chairman a number of years ago and he described his early London to Australia flights. It was in a flying boat, and they landed each day to stay in a hotel overnight before continuing the trip the following day. Seating was in decent lounge chairs as well. Its just gone downhill since then.
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Old 01-27-2015, 08:09 PM   #27
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Depends on where you're riding in the airplane. Fortunately, we always ride up front. Company rule.
No it doesn't. Aren't you the guy who can't stand to be cruising within 10 miles of another boat.

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Old 01-27-2015, 08:10 PM   #28
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Yeah, the trans-oceanic flying boat days must have been great (as long as you didn't know there was a much faster means of getting there just around the corner). Boeing built twelve Model 314s, the so-called Clipper. Half went to Pan Am, the other half went to BOAC. Unfortunately, none of them have survived. The last one was being used as a charter (?) plane in the Carribean in the 1950s (I think). One day it made a forced landing at sea due to some sort of fairly minor engine problem. The USCG came along and took off all the passengers and crew (and put a big dent in the nose in the process) and then sank the plane with gunfire as a hazard to navigation.

We have a color film in our library of a typical flight in the Clipper during its heyday. The film shows the passengers boarding from a launch, the flight deck and the crew going about their duties, the passengers during the day enjoying the scenery and meals, then the berths being made up and the passengers going to bed for the night. Nice way to travel.

You can have something of the same experience on Emirates in their first-class roomettes. Fully enclosed compartment, full size bed, bar that comes up out of the counter at the push of a button, huge video screen, meals prepared to order. and so on. Ticket price one way from Seattle to Dubai is, as I recall, somewhere north of $10,000.

The Boeing Clipper fare was probably similar in 1930s dollars. Maybe even more.
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Old 01-27-2015, 08:31 PM   #29
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No it doesn't. Aren't you the guy who can't stand to be cruising within 10 miles of another boat.

Ted
I don't mind being in an airplane with a bunch of other people. It's only for a few hours and it beats every other means of getting from Point A to Point B when the only objective is to get from Point A to Point B.

When we go from Seattle to Dubai, that's a 16+ hour flight on an Emirates 777-300ER. And it's great. Nice, lie-flat bed, something like a thousand on-demand movies, documentaries, and TV shows to choose from, great food and fabulous flight attendants.

This is way, WAY better than having to transfer flights at some God-awful airport like Atlanta and spend nearly two days getting to the same place, with a good chunk of that time spent in a noisy, crowded airport dealing with neanderthal security people.

I am a total believer in the Boeing air travel philosophy: I want to fly from where I'm at to where I want to be. None of this hub-and-spoke crap. Our planes are all designed to do this. Unfortunately, the ATC system is wandering about somewhere between the opening of the first transcontinental railroad and the launch of the Titanic. Between the outdated equipment, and worse, the inability of countries to cooperate (particularly in Europe), our (and Airbus') planes, which can go anywhere anyone wants them to go, are stuck in an antiquated ATC system.

In the boat, yes, you're correct. One other boat in sight is one too many. But that's a whole different deal that getting about hassle free in as short a time as possible on the planet.
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Old 01-27-2015, 08:34 PM   #30
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Hate flying. Security hassles/denigration. Cramped space. Minimal service. Costs two or more times than a seven-to-ten-day-or-more voyage in a cruise ship. Wish I could afford going first class rather than third-class.
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Old 01-27-2015, 08:37 PM   #31
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I don't mind being in an airplane with a bunch of other people. It's only for a few hours.
Oh? It took 19 hours from Rome to San Francisco on my last trip (December). Thankfully, the two flights (one layover) met/beat the advertised schedule.
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Old 01-27-2015, 08:58 PM   #32
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Oh? It took 19 hours from Rome to San Francisco on my last trip (December). Thankfully, the two flights (one layover) met/beat the advertised schedule.
Well, the first thing you did wrong was not fly direct. Layovers are the biggest wastes of time on the planet.

And when I said "a few hours," that's in comparison to crossing a country by train or slogging across an ocean on a ship where the time is measured in days, not hours. Sorry, life's too short and there's too much to see to waste it on creepy-crawly travel.

We'r'e going to do a long canal trip again in 2017. This is in a boat that travels at 3 mph. But I want to go 600 mph to get to it.
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Old 01-27-2015, 09:15 PM   #33
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So Marin, the obvious question then is, if you're not flying for Boeing and had to actually pay full fair like most of us, what class would you be willing to pay for? I imagine the very thought of travel with us common folk back in steerage has to make you queasy.

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Old 01-27-2015, 09:47 PM   #34
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So Marin, the obvious question then is, if you're not flying for Boeing and had to actually pay full fair like most of us, what class would you be willing to pay for? I imagine the very thought of travel with us common folk back in steerage has to make you queasy.

Ted

Business class. Always. However..... it should be said that we (my crew and I) rack up so many frequent flyer miles over the course of a year that we get the bulk of our vacation air fares at very low cost.

The airlines have made it almost impossible to get promotional fare seats when you actually want them. Fortunately most airlines will now let you apply your miles toward the price of a regular ticket. So even if one has to pay something for the ticket, it's not anything near the full fare.

But we always go business. Too many yowling babies in the back. Plus the back of the plane lands a lot later than the front, right?
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Old 01-27-2015, 10:01 PM   #35
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Marin, we had a three-hour layover in NYC. ... I enjoy days at sea. Sleeping in a bed with clean sheets. Good eating. Time to read. Observing passengers making me feel thin. Entertainment, particularly crooners at the piano bar, and the classical music groups.





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Old 01-27-2015, 10:06 PM   #36
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I have no issues with the back of the plane though I've been up front more than once. Same-same for me, buckle up, put in my ear buds, turn on the iPod and wait for the stewardess to tap my on the shoulder and ask me if I'd like to get off the plane. Great way to travel, sit down take a nap and wake up in a new location
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Old 01-27-2015, 10:12 PM   #37
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I have no issues with the back of the plane though I've been up front more than once. Same-same for me, buckle up, put in my ear buds, turn on the iPod and wait for the stewardess to tap my on the shoulder and ask me if I'd like to get off the plane. Great way to travel, sit down take a nap and wake up in a new location
Ditto!
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Old 01-27-2015, 10:15 PM   #38
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Can't sleep on an airplane! Aaaaghhh! Even while many of our flights are overnight! Hate flying public carriers!
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Old 01-27-2015, 10:23 PM   #39
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I have no issues with the back of the plane though I've been up front more than once. Same-same for me, buckle up, put in my ear buds, turn on the iPod and wait for the stewardess to tap my on the shoulder and ask me if I'd like to get off the plane. Great way to travel, sit down take a nap and wake up in a new location
With the way rows are packed together in the back of the plane, I just can't do it. I'm between 6-4 and 6-5 and long legs and it's a pretty miserable way to travel. Even at 5-9, my wife is uncomfortable. It was always my employer's policy even for entry level employees that any trips 6 hours or more were first class. And as to Marin's non stop, from South Florida to the west coast, that option isn't available.

As to corporate or charter planes, for one or two day round trips with at least 5 or 6 people they're great and not unreasonable. But if you're just going one way, they become quite expensive.
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Old 01-27-2015, 10:31 PM   #40
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Leaving for a ten-day cruise round-trip between San Francisco and the Mexican Riviera and tomorrow. NO PLANE TRAVEL REQUIRED. Doubtful I'll leave the ship at interim ports (been there). The ship IS the destination.


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