Tali, Fuego, Fortune

2008-01-20.

Mom picked us up from the heavily crowded, polluted NAIA Terminal 2 arrivals driveway, and from there we skipped over Manila and drove straight to Tali Beach, where we had borrowed a relative’s friend’s villa. (The trip is normally about two hours’ drive, but took six hours thanks to pre-New Year traffic and heavy SLEX construction. We also swung through Tagaytay to pause for food and restrooms, but unfortunately didn’t get much of a view of Taal through the mist.) The villa at Tali was a lovely Mediterranean affair right by the sea, its architecture airy and wide open to the sea, with several bedrooms, a sprawling backyard and pool overlooking the bay, and a sunny second-floor balcony with a view. We did a Dec. 31st dive at Fortune Island, and New Year was spent with relatives at Punta Fuego. Some photos from the four days we spent there:

Full photoset here.

Novotel Citygate

2008-01-18.

(Sorry for the writing gaps. Lingering jet lag plus bronchitis plus unpacking plus general readjustment is making me somewhat zombie-like.)

At right, our room at Novotel CityGate Hotel near Hong Kong Airport (HKG). En route from JFK we had a 14 hour overnight layover here before transferring to a separately booked flight on Philippine Airlines to Manila. Last time I had such a layover I got a sleeping cubicle at the Plaza Premium Lounge in the airport, but having a wife on this trip called for a hotel room so we could relax and freshen up en route.

Main thing about HKG is that it’s actually quite far from Hong Kong, 30 minutes from the city by high-speed train. Until recently, if you wanted to stay in an airpot hotel your only real choice was the Regal, right outside the terminal, but rooms there run you over $300 for one night. Otherwise you have to go into the city — not something I wanted to do with our giant bags. Novotel Citygate opened in 2006 in Tung Chung, a town on Lantau Island near HKG, initially developed to support airport personnel, now home to its own thriving commercial scene.

The hotel has a free shuttle which leaves twice an hour on the :15s and the :45s, but is not very prominently advertised. After coming out of Arrivals, hotel transport desk B16 will have a little Novotel Citygate sign on it, where you can tell the guy how many people and how many bags are with you, then sit around before joining the shuttle group on a trek through a maze of twisty passages, all alike, ending at the bus, parked at a crew entrance under the new HKG Terminal 2. They load your bags for you, and then it’s a quick five to ten minute trip out of the airport complex, over a bridge, and into Tung Chung.

Check-in was quick and friendly, and they upgraded us to a slightly larger suite at no extra charge. Unfortunately we had arrived after 11PM, far too late to check out food and shopping at the neighboring Citygate Outlet Mall (accessible via a bridgeway just up from the lobby) or any of the hotel restaurants. Our only remaining eating option was Andante, the lobby sports bar, where we had wonton soup and club sandwiches, and I decided to celebrate a bit with a pint of Guinness. (All served by Filipina waitresses, by the way.)

As with most modern hotels, guest rooms use key cards dipped into door slots, and left in a power slot to turn on the lights and air. Lights are a bit confusing, controlled from a large main switch which, when held down, cycles through various on/off and brightness schemes for all light fixtures in all parts of the suite. The space is divided into bath and living areas by a large partition, a sliding door closing the entry side of the bath area. (Most guest rooms, however, do not have this partition, but have the bath area open to the living area, divided only by an artsy central glass column.) There are two sinks (probably just one in the standard guest room), separate glass cubicles for toilet and shower, and a wonderful “rainstorm” shower head. Complimentary soap, shampoo, mouthwash, and lotion come in plastic tubes with caps that are quite difficult to twist on and off — possibly a brilliant theft deterrent.

The standard furnishings are available in the living area — bed, desk, easy chair with ottoman, TV with fun Chinese and English shows; but there is no free hotel internet. Apparently you have to purchase a 3-hour prepaid internet card from the concierge to use wifi — we did without. The window provides a lovely sweeping view of Tung Chung, Lantau Island, and the Ngong Ping Skyrail from higher floors — we didn’t see it much, though, as we slept quite soundly in the rather firm bed.

The shuttle back to the airport the next day dropped us right off at Philippine Airlines in Terminal 2 for check-in. Total cost for a one night layover, with light sports bar dinner and breakfast buffet: ~US$260. That’s actually a bit stiff, but still more than US$100 lower than an equivalent reservation at Regal.

For more info: Official hotel page here, and TripAdvisor reviews here.

JFK-LAX-HKG-MNL

2008-01-12.

From JFK Airport, the trip had three legs: 6 hours on United to Los Angeles, 16 hours on United to Hong Kong (where we would spend an overnight layover), and 2 hours on Philippine Airlines to Manila. Highlights of the flight included flyovers of the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, and Siberia; an overnight layover in a hotel in Tung Chung, and a bump up to upper-deck business class on the PAL 747 between Hong Kong and Manila. A selection of photos follows.

In HKG, words of loving wisdom on the escalators:

In MNL (PAL Terminal 2), scenes of chaos and slapped-together airport management:

Full photoset from just the plane rides here. Enjoy.

The Trip to JFK Airport

2008-01-12.

To make it to a 6AM flight out of JFK from the NJ suburbs while spending as little as possible on transportation, we decided to go the ultra-hard but super-cheap way: NJ Transit to Penn Station, LIRR to Jamaica, and AirTrain to the airport — leaving at midnight to catch the last of the NJT trains. (LIRR trains to Jamaica run all day and night so late night rides are not a problem.)

It is not a trip we will ever be repeating.

Things began to go wrong right before the first leg of our trip, waiting at the NJT station: a screw fell out of the handle of my heaviest rolling suitcase, so that I had to lug it from its lower leather handle, while holding a heavy duffel bag with a previously broken shoulder strap in another hand. Our bags, four pieces in all and ranging from 30 to 50 pounds each, took up a whole pair of facing seats all by themselves. (Fortunately, it was a mostly empty train.)

It was a grueling bag-lug through Penn Station (punctuated by the usual over-loud baroque guitar music) to the LIRR concourse, where we had to figure out that Jamaica-bound trains don’t say “Jamaica” on the sign, but the last stop on the line, necessitating a look at the large system map. When the train arrives at its designated track, you are not told that the elevators are way off in another concourse that descends to the same platform. Unlike the NJT, the LIRR train was quite crowded, without room for our massive and numerous suitcases.

At Jamaica Station, Metro farecards are needed to transfer to the JFK AirTrain, $5 to enter through the turnstiles. My card had only $4 on it, but gladly I had a dollar bill and the patience to navigate MTA’s annoying “PRESS START” farecard interface. Once through the turnstiles, a row of baggage carts brought sighs of relief, and we gratefully loaded our bags onto one, little knowing that the cart would soon be our undoing.

There’s something you need to know about the JFK Airtrain: it lists. Train cars lean in to each stop, forming a tiny step-up — not enough to trip up a person, but enough to catch the front wheel of a loaded baggage cart. The cart stops, bags piled atop it fly off, and suddenly one is trapped between train car and airport terminal, cart stuck in the gap, two errant bags strewn out on the station floor, train doors ready to close at anytime, passing security guard muttering oh-so-helpfully that “you should’ve pulled the cart.”

Somehow I managed to grab the bags that had flown off and pull the cart back into the train as the doors insistently attempted to crush all between them. While making sure the contents of a duffel bag had not been damaged, I closed its zipper with rather more wrath than was warranted in my anger at the cart-gap incident, and tore it clean off its teeth, leaving the bag gaping — for check-in. That was two bags broken.

We settled back to re-traverse the circuit of the airport to get to our target Terminal 7 — which it turned out was closed. Apparently certain JFK airport terminals have closing times — not just for shops and check-in counters, mind you, but the whole terminal is locked up, and people asked to leave. And that’s an international terminal. Fortunately Terminal 4 was still mostly open, with a 24-hour Sbarro which served crisply burnt day-old veggie pizza to tide us over at 3AM, and a SecureWrap outpost to mummify my zip-torn duffel bag in multiple layers of clear plastic.

At 5:15 AM Terminal 7 opened. We had circumvented United’s notoriously rude check-in service with online check-in, and needed only pause to drop off our battle-scarred bags at the check-in counter before going through the requisite laptop-shoes-belt-311-ziploc-bag dance of TSA Security Theater. We boarded, sat, sighed, and agreed to never go through JFK Airport ever, ever again, especially not coming from New Jersey.

Away Message

2008-01-09.

Happy 2008! Amy and I were in the Philippines for two weeks and now we are in Hong Kong for a couple of days to sightsee. (Trip map above.) Internet access in both locations has been neither frequent nor speedy for us, so I have not been able to update much, and will probably not be able to post any new stuff till we’re back in DC later this week.

For now, please enjoy these retro-dated holiday posts: Fifty Ways, Drive-Thru Nativity, and NJ Christmas 2007.

Tali.jpg

2007-12-29.

I’m at the beach right now. Back in 2008 with more. All comments will be queued for moderation till then.

(Tali.jpg uploaded by brownpau.)

NJ Christmas 2007

2007-12-27.

We were in New Jersey this Christmas with Amy’s family. There was Italian food and prime rib, and we got a Metropolitan Museum cat block and sweaters and a couple of Star Trek DVDs and some cash, and I got to watch A Christmas Story for the first time ever, along with The Simpsons Movie. We also saw a car with reindeer antlers, and hung a Moravian star on the tree. It was a nice, quiet, peaceful few days with the in-laws to celebrate Christ’s birth.

Then we flew to the Philippines.

Drive-Thru Nativity

2007-12-27.

I was looking through Stynxno’s “Christmas 2007” photoset and found a fascinating series of photos of a “Drive-Thru Nativity” — a concept with which I had been unfamiliar, but made for some remarkable pictures. (Update: More on this from stynxno himself.)

Fifty Ways

2007-12-27.

Part of US News’ Fifty Ways to Improve your Life in 2008 year-ender feature was an informal video of assorted US News staff giving the fifty tips (video viewable at the upper right of the “50 Ways” page). I make an appearance at around 3m 20s, telling you to smell the roses, because smelling roses is ostensibly good for the brain. (Unfortunately the location I was shooting in lacked flowers of any kind, so I was unable to introduce any expository props into my brief soliloquy.) I had not realized I appear so stiff and expressionless on camera. Next time I am invited to appear in a video I will have to try and channel The Shat.

Russell makes an appearance directly after as well, saying something about corn.

Eduardo San Juan and the Lunar Rover: Message from “Skeet”

2007-12-26.

Got an email from Otha “Skeet” Vaughan Jr., who worked with Wernher von Braun at ABMA, and on the Apollo program and the lunar rovers:

Reference the “The Lunar Rover and Ed San Juan,” you are correct; he did some early work on developing a mobility program for Hayes International in Birmingham and later at Brown Engineering, but as you say he was not the inventor of the Lunar Rover.

We started working on the MOLAB designs in the late 50s. Later we progressed to the Mobility Test Articles which replicated the mobility performance of the MOLAB concept. Later I was responsible for developing the Lunar Environment Design Criteria for the Lunar Rover.

Best source on Rover information at present is developed in the book “Lunar and Planetary Rovers” by Anthony Young. I also worked in the design of the Lunar Driving Simulator that was developed at MSFC.

The rover was not designed by one person but many people had input to the design as it progressed.

Otha H. “Skeet” Vaughan Jr.

ABMA NASA MSFC Retired

Mr. Vaughan is more recently famous for his work in the observation of meteorological phenomena from orbit, including the discovery of sprites and jets.

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