Photo: Gone fishing - Not Bay of Bengal, Arabian Sea

Taken from my hotel room window while on a quick two and a half day visit to Mumbai in 1996. Looks like three guys are out to do some fishing. This was my first and only visit to India and it was a real eye-opener but most strange to me is that I seem to have taken only three photos!

No alternative; I'll just have to go back.

Orginally posted September 2, 2011

Queen's Spiral

Queen's Spiral

Not too far back this week. I visited Greenwich for the first time in twenty years when I was in London in July and this image is from the Queen's house. Visit if you get the chance. While the 'complex' was busy with many tourists - especially the Royal Observatory and the surrounding park - Queen's house was very quiet. There's almost too many pictures of boats for me but I really enjoyed some of the pictures from Cook's Pacific excursions.

 

There's no magic to this photo either: I sat on the ground and turned the camera upwards, but it came out quite well. I wanted to take one from the top but it was closed off.

 

I may be incorrect but I think the scene at the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit was filmed here (from last years PBS television production).
 

Originally posted August 19, 2011

High Up Parking Lot

Haleakala Crater Parking Lot 1991

.

This is a parking lot. Seen in the background is the sweeping vista of central Maui which spreads out over 10,000 feet below where this picture is taken. As the sun rises, you can just about see the shadow cast by the mountain in the middle left of the frame.

It is pretty barren at the top of Haleakala crater but on most mornings there's a lot of life and activity. On the outer edge of the parking lot you can see the tourist bikers who have come up to the crater in a van to watch the sunrise and then ride their rented bikes down the approximately 35miles of road back to town. If you look carefully you can see they have color coded each group based on the colors of their rain slickers.

They have gravity working with them.

From this vantage point we did an about face and hiked down into the magnificence of the crater. No sissy bike riding for us. It's a parking lot but I like it just the same.

 

Originally posted September 22, 2011

Frankfurt Mondrian

Sun rises on Deutschmark city

Less of an archive photo since I took this from my hotel bedroom this morning (2011).  Still, quite pretty.

Originally posted October 14, 2011

Novice Monks on a Boat, Bangkok

Novice Monks on a Boat - Chao Phaya, Bangkok 2001

It's all hustle and bustle on this river that flows through Bangkok and there are all manner of ferries and passenger boats chis-crossing the river in all directions. It's certainly not uncommon to be on one of these ferries standing next to one or a group of these young men wrapped in their golden robes while you both admire the intense activity all around you.

Most boys receive religious education in Thailand and when they turn 20 they are eligible for ordination. Temporary ordination is the norm among Thai Buddhists, and most young men traditionally ordain for the term of a single rainy season and then return to lay life and go on to marry and raise a family.

Originally posted December 9, 2011

Milan Cathedral 1961

Milan Cathedral August 1961

The PND seniors went to Milan and Florence for their honeymoon and this is one of the images from that trip.  Unfortunately, when I visited Milan in 2004 I didn't know this image existed in our archive otherwise I would have my own more recent image.  However, if memory serves from that trip the building is now far cleaner and the area in front of the cathedral is less like a bus depot and more like a pedestrian precinct.

Originally posted December 16, 2011

Hong Kong Harbor September 1968

Car ferries cross from Kowloon to Hong Kong which was the way we first made the journal in 1968.  Since then several tunnel have been built to carry much more traffic.  If you look closely on the left side of the photo you can see a passenger jet lining up to landing at Kai Tak.  On approach it will skim over the rooftops and land on a runway to points right out into the ocean.  That airport is long closed now.

Originally posted April 4th, 2012

Photo: Winter Scene - Upsate New York

Winter is finally over.

Michael Cairns

Intercontinental Kabul

Sad to see another attack at the IC Kabul today. We were there back in 1973. See flickr album.
I still remember a lot about this trip even though I was a kid and it was a long time ago.

 

Two million miles flown.

I think I got 90% of them counted. Beginning in 1968 - through last week.

And which airports have I visited the most:

EWR				712
LHR				390
BOS				79
SFO				78
DCA				76
JFK				70
LAX				59
HNL				52
OGG				41
FRA				37
ORD				37
CVG				34
SYD				32
CMH				27
ATL				26
HKG				21
BKK				19
DFW				16
GVA				16
IAD				15
MEL				15
PDX				14
DET				13
SEA				12
CDG				11
LGA				11
TXL				11
DUB				10
YYZ				10
AKL				8
LAS				8
LIR				8
LNY				8
ZCH				8
OLY				7
IAH				6
LIN				6
MCO				6
MIA				6
MSY				6
THR				6
PBI				6
DEN				4
HAM				4
ROM				4
SING				4
TPA				4
BUD				3
AMS				3
ARL				2
Beirut				2
Birm				2
BNA				2
BNA				2
BOM				2
BRU				2
CBR				2
CNS				2
DAYTON				2
DEL				2
EDI				2
GLA				2
ICH				2
KBL				2
KHI				2
LHE				2
MAD				2
MSP				2
MXP				2
NRT				2
ORK				2
PEK				2
PEW				2
PPT				2
PRG				2
RSW				2
SAN				2
YUL				2
YVR				2
YVR				2
MAN				1
SLE				1
VIE				1

Traveling this Big Country: 3200 miles in a Honda Element

It is frequently said that the fastest way between two points is a straight line and there's no better argument for that thesis than the route Interstate 40 (i40) takes between Knoxville, Tn and Kingman, Arizona. There's no reason to know this unless, like me, you've driven i40 across the US.

Back in 1988, as I was graduating from Georgetown a fellow student happened to mention that he had no idea how he was going to get his car back to his home in California. On a whim, a friend and I told him we would drive it for him and, long story short, we set of in early May and arrived in Los Angeles about 12 days later. Great trip, good memories but few photos to catalog this adventure. The car - a white Camaro was a disaster but, that aside, I wanted to do the trip again almost immediately.  (You can find images from this trip HERE)

A few years ago, I read about a company which will arrange to move cars from one part of the country to the other. The car can go on a truck - most expensive option - or it can be driven. The company finds a driver to do the grunt work and signing up to do this is actually a lot easier than you might expect. An outfit named autodriveaway (a loose franchise operation) publishes a list of available cars and if you are interested you call the location with the listing. I began checking the list regularly and in late April a pair of cities - pick-up in Alexandria and drop off in San Francisco - looked promising. Once I got in touch with the Alexandria office, I had the whole thing worked out within a few days.

On the morning of Monday May 23rd I took Amtrak to Alexandria, picked up the car and spent the night at my sister-in-laws' place. The next day, I was on the road out of DC by 7am to my first stop in Knoxville. The car was an orange painted Honda Element which I tried to pass off a 'burnt gold' until my sister in law said "that's orange" which settled the matter. I arrived in Knoxville around 5pm which turned out to be a consistent routine for the next week until I arrived in San Francisco six days later.

The country is so vast and so variable that it needs to be experienced to comprehend. Deep green fields and red barns through Virginia, rolling hills through Tennessee, flat farmland in Texas, desert in Arizona and snow capped mountains in California. And i40 is very straight. Often coming over a rise, the road ahead would stretch directly straight to the horizon. It's mesmerizing if you're not used to it as well as being hard to photograph while driving.

Running along side i40 is the old route 66 and I like neon, old store fronts and buildings. There's still a lot of this on route 66. If you are not in a hurry and willing to dart off i40 and (frequently) back-track to something that caught your eye going 80mph this travel can be very distracting. These side trips turned up more than a few curious and interesting sights. In Shamrock, Texas I happened on a car graveyard in a field just off main street. There were more than 30 abandoned, rusted, shot up cars and trucks from the 1930s-60s. I spent a while taking photos and no one bothered me: Things seemed to go slowly in Shamrock. There were Trump yard signs.

I deliberately didn't give myself time to explore the cities where I spent the night: Knoxville, Memphis, Oklahoma City, Albuquerque, Kingman, Mammouth Lakes and I know there is much more to see on this route. For next time. I had to keep to a schedule so I could get in business meetings once I arrived in San Francisco.

The entire trip was fantastic but the penultimate travel day from Kingman, bypassing Las Vegas to Death Valley, and then north to Mammoth Lakes was incredible for the change in scenery, landscape and temperature! When I arrived in Death Valley the temperature was 107 degrees at 120feet below sea level and arriving at Mammoth Lakes it was 52 degrees at 7000 feet. The final day drive through Yosemite via the Tioga pass road was like a roller coaster ride up through mountain passes and then down the other side to San Francisco. Up to (almost) 10,000 ft with snow still on the ground compared to yesterday's 107degress was disorienting. Pushing on through the park, I saw the remnants of charred pine trees from those massive fires several years ago and then golden fields of drought stricken grasses on the Western side of the range.

A week after I set out, I dropped the car off with the owner, who I had never met and, in one of those odd coincidences, it turned out we had several common business friends. I spent the rest of the week sightseeing in the city and attending my business meetings and then flew back at the end of the week. During the trip I took over 600 photos - all without crashing the car. (They are all here: https://goo.gl/DkfFvh ). I traveled about 3200 miles on total.

Drivers don't get paid for these trips, although I did get a $300 gas credit; for me, the trip would not have been worth it - too expensive - unless I had a better way. So the best thing about this whole trip was that I did it all using airline points. All the hotels, the train and the business class flight back cost me nothing. At least that's something I got out of traveling so much over the past three years.

I look forward to doing this again sometime and I wistfully keep looking at the list of available cars. But with a house literally in ruins it's not likely for a long while.

Travelin' man, that's what I was.

Travel has always been a constant in my professional life.  There have been gaps but for the most part I've had to travel for business constantly since I joined my first company after grad school back in 1989.   Growing up we were a Pan Am family because the company my father worked for was owned by Pan Am and, much of the time, we were able to fly first class on airline employee passes.  As a child I developed a distorted idea of how normal people traveled.  But, we had it good for a long time.

In the late 1970s - early 80s all the fun was soaked out of flying.  It became an angry experience.  People didn't dress up to fly any more.  No one wanted to take you to the airport to see the planes.  People get ugly and angry with frequency.   I admit to some of that myself on occasion.

Over the past three years, I traveled internationally far more than I expected.  Our business was challenged (to understate our circumstance) and this situation required me to be in the UK almost constantly.  When friends and colleagues ask me about this experience they have - on my behalf - tried to calculate miles and round trips and hours spent.  To be honest, while the travel was far more than expected it wasn't my place to complain but friends (and Mrs PND) with more objective points of view remain astonished that there wasn't an intervention of sorts to help reduce my travel.  There was no way this could continue at this level.

So I got to thinking what the numbers really looked like and here's what I came up with for my travel over the past 36 months:

• 440,000 miles flown (415,000 on United).
• 185,000 miles flown in 2014
• 100 flights in/out of Heathrow
• 150 flights in/out of Newark
• Other cities: Beijing, Tokyo, Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, San Francisco, Washington, New Orleans, Chicago. Edinburgh, Boston, New Delhi, Berlin, Manchester,
• Typical travel week included more than 20 hrs in travel time
• Approximately 75 books read
• Complete seasons of Deadwood, Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad + assorted others
• 840,000 airlines miles/points earned
• (Only) 2 complimentary upgrades
• Platinum United frequent flyer (and gold for life)
• Approximately 90 round trips (75 out of Newark)
• Approximately 25 mileage upgrades to business class (not enough!)
• 1 cancelled flight
• Approximately 65 multiple day rent-a-cars
• Approximately 300 hotel nights
• Approximately 100 nights with my parents (stress inducer but money saver)
• 0 economy class meals eaten
• 2,800 miles running (to stay in shape and reduce stress!)
• 60+ train trips: Amtrak, UK, Europe
• Conservatively, 2,000 photos
• 1 missed hotel fire alarm

That was my job (and I wouldn't wish it on anyone).   In order to make sense and reduce stress and anxiety a set of routines are almost forced on the frequent traveler.  I knew the configuration of the different planes traveling between the US and UK so I'd look for specific seats to grab.  I'd try to execute a strategy so that I could maximize the chance of the seat next to me being left open.  Having a little more room to sleep on an over night flight becomes the most important goal in the days running up to departure.  But flights on Sunday (out) and Thursday (home) are rarely empty.  Sunday departures were always the worst since I'd begin packing around 3pm and leave for the airport around 4.  But, arriving Monday morning gave me the 'right' to return on home Thursday night.

Since I left PT (now "Ingenta") I've continued to travel but I don't see myself spending this amount of time on aircraft and at airports any time soon.

Next - What's in my bag?

Michael Cairns has served as CEO and President of several technology and content-centric business supporting global media publishers, retailers and service provider.  He can be reached at michael.cairns@outlook.com and is interested in discussing new business opportunities for executive management and/or board and advisory positions

Image: Dutch Haven 1970 Pennsylvania

I don't know what a shoo-fly pie is but it must have something to do with wind mills.  I believe this place is still there.

Image Boston: North Street & Paul Revere House

I had a really good dinner at Mamma Maria's this week.  In this photo from 1971 the restaurant is in the house that has the white store sign (ABRU).  Not having been here before the location was immediately recognisable to be (and hasn't changed) because of this photo.

North Street & Paul Revere House: 1971

Image: Manhattan Bridge and Empire State

A bit of a touristy photo.  From December last year when I found myself in Dumbo for the first time.

Image: Close to Royalty

From last summer on The Mall.

Friday Image: From Above - Blurb Book

Another blurb book I put together recently. There won't be any more for a while now.

From Above: Photos from the Window Seat. by Edited by Michael Cairns | Make Your Own Book

Photo: Arizona Desert 1992

Saguaro cactus from the desert around Scottsdale Arizona.  The channels in their trunk help to push the wind up and over the plant so that they don't topple over.  Learn something every day here at PND.

Looking South from Rock Center 1968

Looks a little different now.  My kind of town.

Photo Friday: Another Blurb Book

Since it is Friday and last weeks post got so many views I thought I would add another Blurb book but this one I did for my in-laws.  My father in law spent a few years in the army in 1956-8 or so and was stationed in Iceland.  These images have stood up well considering they were in the basement for 20+ years.  (Blurb Bookstore)