(no subject)
Mar. 25th, 2008 10:41 amI'm in Napa, CA; this is being written offline in the hotel room on Monday night, for uploading on Tuesday morning; no point paying for the broadband in the room when the meeting will have free (or at any rate included) wireless.
The renovaions of the Tucson airport are much closer to finished than they were in September, when we were walking on bare concrete and speculating on the identity of the various pipes laid bare by the stripped-out ceiling in the gate area. The concession food prices seem to have jumped, though.
There's a remarkable variety of scenery on the way from Tucson to Oakland via Las Vegas; the landscape under the plane goes from the jagged brown scrub-stubbled desert to higher mountains scalloped and deckled with snow, and then to the rumpled green hills of northern California and the shimmering steel-blue expanse of the Bay. (Also, there's a better view of the Strip from the Las Vegas runway than I'd remembered; I clearly saw the pyramid and its sphinx, and the bit of ersatz New York skyline as well as some great glass slabs of more conventional hotel and maybe a glimpse of Eiffel Tower, with a bit of snow-kissed mountain in the background.
From Oakland we drove up to Napa, from the traffic and tangled concrete freeways of Silicon Valley to the fields and vineyards and little roadside wine-themed tourist traps. The roadside flowers were neon-vivid in the afternoon sunshine: yellow rock rose and shocking-pink iceplant, orange poppies and the delicate purple-blue of lupines and a deeper purple that my heart kept wanting to misread as heather. The sheer prettiness of this part of the world, with its little hills piled up to the sky, its grasses and wildflowers and blossoming trees, always takes me by surprise; it's easy to understand why so many people wanted to live here in the first place. There were lots of small birds in some of the fields, at least some of them red-winged blackbirds. I could almost regret only bringing the small camera, but only almost; I'm not going to have much time for the flowers on this trip, once the meeting starts.
The toiletries in the hotel bathroom are wine-bottle shaped, and the conference trinket is a corkscrew -- which is likely to be something of an embarrassment to those traveling without checked luggage! It makes a change from coffee cups and umbrellas.
The built-in SD card reader in this laptop is remarkably unreliable; it was touchy about my 1GB mini-SD-and-adapter and completely failed to recognize the new 2GB card, so it's just as well I brought along the PC-card adapter. Maybe it needs better drivers, or maybe it's just flaky. Because I needed the PC-card gadget anyway for the little camera's memory sticks, I've never used it much.
The renovaions of the Tucson airport are much closer to finished than they were in September, when we were walking on bare concrete and speculating on the identity of the various pipes laid bare by the stripped-out ceiling in the gate area. The concession food prices seem to have jumped, though.
There's a remarkable variety of scenery on the way from Tucson to Oakland via Las Vegas; the landscape under the plane goes from the jagged brown scrub-stubbled desert to higher mountains scalloped and deckled with snow, and then to the rumpled green hills of northern California and the shimmering steel-blue expanse of the Bay. (Also, there's a better view of the Strip from the Las Vegas runway than I'd remembered; I clearly saw the pyramid and its sphinx, and the bit of ersatz New York skyline as well as some great glass slabs of more conventional hotel and maybe a glimpse of Eiffel Tower, with a bit of snow-kissed mountain in the background.
From Oakland we drove up to Napa, from the traffic and tangled concrete freeways of Silicon Valley to the fields and vineyards and little roadside wine-themed tourist traps. The roadside flowers were neon-vivid in the afternoon sunshine: yellow rock rose and shocking-pink iceplant, orange poppies and the delicate purple-blue of lupines and a deeper purple that my heart kept wanting to misread as heather. The sheer prettiness of this part of the world, with its little hills piled up to the sky, its grasses and wildflowers and blossoming trees, always takes me by surprise; it's easy to understand why so many people wanted to live here in the first place. There were lots of small birds in some of the fields, at least some of them red-winged blackbirds. I could almost regret only bringing the small camera, but only almost; I'm not going to have much time for the flowers on this trip, once the meeting starts.
The toiletries in the hotel bathroom are wine-bottle shaped, and the conference trinket is a corkscrew -- which is likely to be something of an embarrassment to those traveling without checked luggage! It makes a change from coffee cups and umbrellas.
The built-in SD card reader in this laptop is remarkably unreliable; it was touchy about my 1GB mini-SD-and-adapter and completely failed to recognize the new 2GB card, so it's just as well I brought along the PC-card adapter. Maybe it needs better drivers, or maybe it's just flaky. Because I needed the PC-card gadget anyway for the little camera's memory sticks, I've never used it much.