Transplanting a Seattleite

The electrician arrived! Yay!

There is a lot of early morning banging. So, there’s that. I’m glad, but A. is miserable, and we still don’t know (but will soon, foreshadowing later in this post) when insulation is happening. Obviously, the electrician doing that work means insulation CAN happen. Which is good! Turns out google nest has discontinued the smoke alarms we use, and the replacements through First Alert (boooooo) are not yet available. R. ordered them without discussion, and we don’t even have a shipping date. Reddit is not encouraging on this topic, either. In the event, we can slap any battery powered ones up there we want to. We could get reseller google nest ones, but a lot of that is old stock.

There are a bunch of Ring, Alexa and other integrated smoke alarms, battery and hardwired. Some of them say things like z-wave. It’s clearly going to take a while to investigate and it’s unclear that any of this is useful in the new house, because it’s going to have sprinklers and a fire panel so it probably has commercial everything anyway. I do need to ask some questions about that, clearly.

A. wanted to wash her hair this morning, so a shower got added to the schedule, and we weren’t exactly ahead of schedule. But we did get her through that process. I didn’t have time to do much more than the minimum on Duo.

Later in the day, we got the insulation install date, so that’s something. Of course, that triggered a bunch of implementation on earlier research, because while the VOCs on this stuff aren’t too bad, they are still not compatible with being in the house while the work is being done, or for a certain amount of time thereafter. We also have to coordinate with getting R. to a hotel near Deerfield for the night before his bike race. Complications!

But it’s all sorted out, including a couple dinner reservations. Tomorrow I’ve got a long day with meetings both before and after the usual OAC / MEPFP and walk arounds. I need to figure out my morning schedule some time before I go to bed tonight.

I walked with M. at 1 pm.

Someone finally came over and picked up the two mini flashlights that take one AAA battery each! Yay! Nice guy. He’s a mechanic for another town’s DPW, and loses them all the time. Might as well lose an old one!

ETA:

The guy who picked up the Hue Bloom lights is struggling to get them to work. He’s partway there, and is being nice about it, so I’m trying to help him out. I don’t really know what to think about any of this, especially since FB Messenger is warning me this might be a scam, but I really don’t think it is.

I dusted my room while chatting on the phone with Priestess. That was lovely.

I also transferred the summer skorts and shorts to the main dresser and moved the longer, warmer pants to the secondary dresser in the closet. I really should pare some of this down, and probably will over the course of the summer.

I got out my old Kokoons, realized that I no longer pack a micro usb in my charging bag, went downstairs to retrieve one (I only use the Kokoons on transatlantics), and actually found the cord that originally went with it. That’s a sign that the volume of cords we have around is manageable, and that we’ve saved the right ones. Love it! I grabbed a spare block while I was there, altho I won’t travel with it. The combo induction charger has a usb-a in in the front and that should work fine. Probably should test it some time soon.

Oooh, and someone just came and picked something up from the bin on the porch. R. keeps turning the porch light off, and I keep having to remind him to leave it on. At the holidays, for deliveries. And lately, for late pickups from the bin.

The smaller hair sprayer looks great and works fine.

I ordered a regular ipad (a16, but I bumped the memory up some) so I could get the magic keyboard folio and see what that was like. I have mixed feelings about it. I still so love the keyboard folio I took for granted with the ipad pro from 2020 that I foolishly replaced. I wish there were more / better smart connector options. I’m currently using a TypeCase (purple!) but I really fucking loathe bluetooth keyboards.

I discovered, to my chagrin, that the a16 compatible pencil is the one of four pencils that I’ve never acquired. It might also be compatible — I’m not sure — with the original pencil, but I’d already put that in ewaste, took it out of ewasted, listed on FB marketplace and gave away. I wasn’t in a hurry to spend that kind of money on something I provably will only use to become familiar with it and then never again, but then Amazon served me up the ESR digital pencil, and that is a compelling price point. Also, purple. I’m never really going to use it so I don’t care about the pressure sensitivity, and it has everything else. Would be nice if it had wireless charging, but I’m not prepared to complain about it, honestly. It uses USB-C.

I’m almost to a point where I’m ready to do a test pack for Balticon, which in turn is a test run for one-bagging longer trips in the summer. I’m not genuinely trying to one bag, but while I can manage two rollers with soft bags strapped to the top on an escalator, it makes me irritable, and my poorly concealed inner control freak persists in believing it should be possible to traverse an airport and public transport with equanimity (obviously an excessively high standard, but if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll have gotten used to that). My goal is to have A. use her roller and soft bag, for me to have a backpack (specifically, the Fjallraven 17” laptop, which fits under every airline seat as near as I can tell), each of us have a small-to-medium sized purse, and if I cannot quite get everything into my backpack, overflow needs to fit into her soft bag. This should let me completely takeover all of her stuff and my stuff (because when she meltsdown, asking her to deal with luggage does not make it better) and continue, if not with equanimity, at least at speed to a location more amenable to her.

I walked with M. in the morning, to make up for so many missed walks during the week. I was tired after, which is a sign I really needed to walk.

We made a scramble for A. for lunch and it turned out well.

I had a chicken, veg and egg fried rice for dinner. I’d made the rice earlier for T. when he came over for lunch. He had it with some carrots, apple juice and chicken.

I didn’t really have plans for the day, so I took a look at the upcoming weekends during construction, focusing on ones after T. is back home, looking for something to do that would be fun and would get us away from the house for a few days. A. and I are going to try BaltiCon, and leave R. and T. at home. My sister and her offspring will join us. They are even going to stay in a hotel instead of driving back and forth each day, which will be fun. I made reservations at Bunny’s and at Kona Grille. Should be fun.

I only know about this because Rorschach sent me a link to news coverage. We’ve been going back and forth about it for a couple hours now.

The basic idea is simple: walk into the airport about 15 minutes before boarding for your flight starts, to minimize the amount of time you have to spend in the hellscape that is an airport.

The actual implementation is thinly detailed. Does this include checking a bag or not? Michael DiCostanzo on TikTok sometimes checks a bag and sometimes does not. He seems to always have a roller with him, tho, so this isn’t a one-bagger only using the underseat space situation.

In general, boarding for a flight starts 30-50 minutes before departure, so arriving at the airport 15 minutes before boarding would imply arriving 45 minutes to over an hour before departure. For a big chunk of my life, the advice was to arrive at an airport one hour before departure for a domestic flight, so airport theory is not appreciably different than that. That advice continued well into the post-9/11 era, as security lines got long and painful. By the time PreCheck became common, the advice had evolved to 2 hours before departure for a domestic flight.

However, we’ve now been in 2 hours before advice-land and the control freaks out there — hey, I’m one of you, and very committed to concealing that fact from everyone I can, which I now realize is a sign I have a problem, so this is me standing up and saying, Hi, I’m W., and I am a Control Freak — have largely interpreted 2 hours as 2 hours before _boarding_ rather than 2 hours before _departure_. Further, I’m generous with travel time allowance. As a practical matter, that means that I am driving to the airport 3 hours before boarding, arriving more than 2 hours before boarding, and sitting down to eat a meal at the airport including alcohol, and arriving at the gate post-meal with at least a half hour to go before boarding starts. It’s really stupid, it takes up a lot of the travel day and my daughter is really difficult to manage because she’s quite sensitive to noise and the smell of jet fuel.

I’ve noticed how many times I could have literally stayed home until about the time my flight was due to depart, get in the car, drive to a nice restaurant, eat, and in a leisurely way continue to the airport, arrive at my gate and board, sometime around the time the flight was supposed to be landing, and then enjoy an hour or more sitting in the plane as it attempts to get to a point where it can take off. It gnaws at my soul. I do enjoy traveling, but honestly, this part isn’t much fun. And it’s no good telling me to take the train or drive. I can’t drive across the ocean (or take a train across an ocean). And even with delays, driving and the train take much longer than a transcon. Also, anyone out there advising a train when never having done it themselves (other than to/from NYC) probably has no idea what’s involved in renting a car at your destination. Usually, you have to take a taxi from the train station to the airport.

I’m leaving out that time my flight was outright canceled and rescheduled to a day later. Honestly, that one worked out pretty well for me, except for the fact that I used to check a bag in those days and the line was hours long and I missed my flight anyway.

Where was I?

Oh, right. Traveling as a family full of autism.

It’s clear from Michael Dicostanzo’s non-airport TikToks that he enjoys calculating risks and betting. He likes to be a little daring, and to have something on the line. Airport theory is a really great opportunity for him to do this. What I don’t understand is all the pearl-clutching news coverage of Airport Theory.

See above, Airport Theory is just Go Back to Airport Arrival Advice Norms from 10-15 years ago.

Now, why is Airport Theory a bad idea? Let me count the ways.

First, it does not specify don’t check a bag. If you are going to do this, Don’t Check a Bag. Honestly, if you are at an airport, probably don’t check a bag.

Second, it does not specify that you need to supervise the packing of everyone traveling with you. My husband routinely extends our time at security by packing bike tools deeply in his roller, and then they want to see them and boom, it’s 10 minutes later before we arrive at the Recombobulation Area. I don’t normally care that much, because remember, I get to the airport excessively early.

A little side note about my packing. I have an underseat bag (soft, expandable) and a overhead sized roller (travelpro and I paid for the good wheels). The underseat bag is a container for my backpack and my purse, so it’s largely empty until I get to security, where I shove everything in there because people get upset if they see a roller a backpack a purse and a soft bag. Idiots. I’ve taken to doing this using the sizer as a table, just to make the point super clear. They get extra weird about it, which is kind of fun. Anyway. I make a point of putting in the backpack anything that security might have any possible interest in. That way, it’s really easy to access. And of course, they can see it clearly and they don’t need to see it. The stuff in the roller is clothes and shoes. Also makes it light to get the roller into the overhead.

Third, it does not specify that you need to monitor for locations for filling your water bottle (you are bringing an empty water bottle with you through security, right?) and if you won’t be satisfied with snack provisioning on the plane, you’ll need to bring those with you too, because you probably won’t have time to stop at a shop.

If you can pack correctly, and know where the water bottle fillers are, and your route to the airport is not so long that you will need to pee before you board, and you can remember to bring your snacks with you, Airport Theory is probably fine. Altho I would strongly urge you to monitor lines at the airport you are proposing to use it at via website or app or whatever, and if the airport will involve a tram or bus ride to get to your gate, add a little extra leeway for that.

Basically, if you are enough of a control freak that this trend bothers you, you probably could get away with Airport Theory, and it probably infuriates you that you can’t bring yourself to do it. Me, it sort of infuriates me that in order to do this, I’d have to be boundary violating at my husband which in no way makes me happy. I didn’t even him force him to quit checking a bag until that missed flight. I’d already determined I could carry-on only with the kids years before that.

A lot of this is about transportation. It’s January, so I’ve been engaging in a lot of travel planning for the year. I’m also trying to be a lot more conscious about long-standing areas of conflict and unhappiness. So I’ve been doing things, for example, like very consciously shopping for bras to see if the kind of bra that I think I would be comfortable wearing even exists. Anywhere. Not just a bra that I can tolerate when I have to, but one that I actually am completely okay with wearing. It’s a high bar, I know.

Another area is airports specifically, but also how to make travel be more of an enjoyable experience for all the participants. We’ve really made significant progress over the years, but we’re in the middle of a huge transition right now because T. says he won’t be traveling with us (as much) any more, so it’ll be three of us again instead of four. We also caught up on our big commitments (go to Seattle and the Netherlands and the UK) last year, so while I’d love to get back to Seattle some time this year, I don’t feel like I _have_ to, and I’m not flying over an ocean this year. We had talked about Quebec for a long time (I’ve never been to Canada east of Alberta, and R.’s ancestry is Quebecois on his dad’s side), planned a road trip for August 2020 and you can guess what happened to that. I’m in the process of bringing that trip back from cold storage — possibly literally all the same stops in the same places on the same dates, altho some of what we will do in each place will be different because restaurants go out of business sometimes, alas.

I did look at cruise and rail options for the Quebec trip, and there are really interesting possibilities for both, but I drew back because they wouldn’t give us any time in Rimouski and Trois Pistoles and R. really wanted that. But I did start to really develop some familiarity with Amtrak and Via and I started asking a lot of questions and thinking about what would it take to get most passengers out of planes and onto trains instead.

I think the first, and most important thing, is the schedule. If you want to go from Seattle to Spokane, there’s a train, but it’s once a day, and it arrives in Spokane at 2ish in the morning and leaves shortly thereafter. That’s terrible. I mean, really, really terrible. We really need the continued spread of things like the Sounder, and maybe more of things like Brightline. If you can do the trip in a car, but it is an exhaustingly long drive (for most people, anything over 4 hours is probably more driving than they really want to do), it’s ideal for a train, because you don’t need to provide sleeping accommodations. But you also need to make sure that you’ve got some choice of arrival and departure. There will be some trains that leave late and arrive even later that will attract riders (I kinda wish they’d bring back the really late departures on Fitchburg line, for example, so we could listen to all the encores at a concert without worrying about missing our train home), but ordinary people wanting to get from Seattle to Spokane don’t really want to be arriving at 2 in the morning.

It’s a chicken and egg problem — a better schedule will attract more ridership and you need more ridership to justify more scheduling choices. There are also issues in terms of traffic on the line because most of these lines are shared passenger and freight.

The second, and possibly as important thing, is wifi and quality of wifi. To the extent that trains run through populous areas which have cellular data service, the train doesn’t need to offer wifi itself — people can use their phones. But as the train moves faster and the towers are spread out more, the handoffs become trickier and the lags worse and it’s annoying. A person who might take a train, so they can work instead of having to drive, might instead go looking for a flight, where they can work in the terminal, and possibly even work during the flight. There’s no obvious reason that trains couldn’t have the same kind of satellite based (typically Viasat) internet that some flights have, but of course Starlink is way better and Brightline has demonstrated it works great on trains. It’s a little weird that the way Starlink wound up on Brightline is that somebody experienced Starlink on a cruise and then went and got it for his trains. But whatever.

The third, and most unclear component of this puzzle, is sleeping accommodations. Pullman cars of yore had 2nd class accommodations in which facing double/wide seats could convert to berths that were 35” wide. This is substantially wider than either of the berths in any of the roomettes, altho not as wide as the lower berth in a bedroom, in any of the sleeper cars on current Amtrak trains. Then, as now, a popular choice was to book that pair of seats / berths for a single person so the upper berth was never pulled down; you got more headroom for getting ready before pulling the curtain back. It wasn’t a full compartment, the way a roomette is, but it was a “section”. If we intend to move a lot of people who travel cross country off of planes and into trains, and those are people who can afford to pay for a seat in Mint, it makes sense to offer them something along these lines. I mean, sure the Mint seat _is_ narrower even than the upper bunk in a Superliner Roomette, but at least in the Mint seat, your shoulders and feet are largely enclosed and you don’t have to climb up and down a weird not-quite-ladder.

Anyone who has repeatedly driven up and down either of the coasts has probably at least thought about taking the train instead (we did when I was a kid in the 70s — we drove it twice and took the train once and then we flew — the heat got stuck on in our car and it was horrible. We did not have any sleeping accommodations at all), and most people still wind up flying if they can’t face the drive. The flight is cheap, compared to driving and staying in hotels or sleeping accommodations on the train. The other factor is the amount of time involved. I would argue that really reliable internet access might make the train a more viable replacement for flying, especially if there are any intermediate destinations that one might want to stop. However, the current limited schedule makes it hard to stop for part or all of one day and then resume one’s trip. Further, the cost associated with getting off and then on a later train on the same route can be prohibitive unless you’re doing some kind of rail pass / coach only trip.

There are some auxiliary problems associated with rail travel that are probably much more straightforward to solve (altho maybe not!). The biggest is the intermodal problem. While there are cities large enough to have some kind of connectivity from the train to the airport, there are plenty of cities where, if you flew into them, you would rent a car as your next travel step. And when you arrive in the train station in such a city (or an even smaller city or town) there is rarely an open rental car service in that train station (there might not a station, per se, honestly, just a platform and if you’re lucky an automated ticket kiosk). To some degree, the existence of Uber/Lyft/etc. mitigates this problem, and sometimes there are shuttles to a rental car service located elsewhere or a number you can call to access such a shuttle or whatever. But it’s annoying as fuck. I am so happy that Brightline puts parking garages at their stations and incorporates car rental services within those garages. If you are going to move people out of airports and into trains, This Is the Way.

As I noted in a previous entry, I started doing this research in an effort to avoid airports, because I was operating under the theory that Airports Are the Problem. Of course, Airports are NOT the problem. R. is the problem. We’re working on figuring out how we can help him respond to the inevitable stressors of travel in some way that is less problematic to his travel companions (me and A., basically). However, now that I’ve started, I’ve gotten really interested in this conundrum for several reasons.

First, it really bothers me that I can go read economic projections for air travel extending out decades. I can also go read projections about climate and fossil fuel use and so forth. I’m not totally oblivious. I know that we are much further along the path to making boats and trains less dependent on fossil fuels than we are to having the kind of air travel we have now less dependent on fossil fuels. I’m not saying air travel is going to go away. I, personally, would _love_ to see a large scale return to airships. But I don’t think airships are going to go at the speeds that we are used to with current air planes. And the observations I am making above — schedule, internet/wifi and sleeping accommodations — apply to _all_ “slow mode” travel. Airlines and airplane manufacturers seem to exist in a planning universe that does not anticipate a systematic reduction in the use of air planes. However, climate projections really _want_ us to systematically reduce our use of air planes. We all exist in the same reality. Only one of these things is gonna be right.

Second, business travel on air planes has not returned to pre-covid levels, in part because of efforts to keep spending down during an inflationary period, and in part because covid normalized virtual meetings thus changing the nature of business travel. I absolutely knew people pre-covid who refused to fly because of the climate impact, and I absolutely was aware of the climate impact of air travel. However, it had not occurred to me that you didn’t need to replace air travel with other travel, but you could actually just not travel, if you had really good communications systems. Seems kinda like a duh thing now, but I sure wasn’t thinking about that in 2018 and it’s not like we didn’t _have_ zoom and things like zoom. It’s just that a lot of people had no experience with them. We all got a lot of experience with them in a hurry, and for the people that worked well for, they suddenly can avoid airports a lot more effectively.

Third, developments in multiple conflicts around the world have recently showcased just how effective small scale, no-human-aboard equipment (“drones”) can be at destroying large scale, humans-aboard equipment. It really is an indication that we don’t need to replace airplanes with less-bad-for-the-climate-airplanes. We use airplanes to accomplish goals. Thinking about the goals can lead us to alternatives that accomplish those goals in very, very different ways. Drones can be used to replace agricultural use of planes, too, which is a huge deal.

I’m not saying, get rid of planes, we don’t need planes, no one should ever fly, we should ban air travel blah blah blah. Wtf. No. I’m still out there shopping for plane tickets for trips later this year. Come on. What I am trying to do is to visualize what kinds of adjustments we should be making now or soon so that we bend the curve on what trips happen and in what kind of vehicles.

I’m paying attention now to Amtrak’s RFIs for next-gen long-distance trains. They are focused pretty closely on accessibility, which is very important. I’m happy that money has been allocated to this very important project. But while Amtrak offers wifi on some trains, and is planning to upgrade at least Acela / NEC to 5G, it isn’t upgraded yet. It is an indication of just how awful airports are that Acela was able to persistently divert so many people from air shuttles to the train, even with absolutely erratic wifi.

All that was pretty focused on passenger travel. However, stuff has to move around, too. R. tells me that there are plans to get an icebreaker into the Great Lakes, so that containers can be shipped into the the lakes instead of transferring containers to rails. This is a big deal for a lot of reasons (reduction in fuel use, reduction in cost, and if you bring containers _in_ then you have a chance to ship stuff _out_ cheap, which should be _really really good_ in terms of encouraging the return of manufacturing to the middle of the country), among those reasons is that it might free up rail capacity for moving humans around.

I’m trying to figure out currently how air cargo works. If you look at dedicated flights, it _looks_ like there is a lot more passenger air travel than cargo. But if you look at the fraction of a passenger flight that is cargo, you get a very different picture. Again, you have to ask how that cargo would move if it did not go on a plane. Would it move at all? Would it move on a train, a truck? Would it instead be made somewhere else, closer to where it is wanted? One of the biggest impacts of the grounding in 2001 of all flights was that it stopped checks moving around. We passed legislation enabling the full electronic processing of checks in subsequent years and now we don’t fly checks around; they were once a huge fraction of air cargo. What else are we shipping in planes that we would be utterly flabbergasted at the idea of moving at all, physically, in decades to come?

Guess what we did over the holidays.

I’ll catch up on blogging over the next few days. I’ve been doing laundry and while I loved a lot of how I packed over this trip, as always, I have some Refinements to Make.

Also, the Jettle arrived, a small electric kettle disguised cleverly as a portable beverage container. It’s pretty awesome, altho thermopen says that when you program it for 158 you get 150; I’ll do some more checking later so I know what I’m getting based on what it is programmed for. If this thing doesn’t die on me, I may be able to have truly excellent pour over coffee and/or black tea while traveling, even if I’m staying in a room that does not supply me with anything genuinely helpful in accomplishing that goal. I’m a little unclear on whether this thing is TSA compliant. I assume it is? But I should probably check.

ETA: According to this, it should be fine:

https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/whatcanibring/items/tea-kettle

ETAYA:

I spent a ludicrous amount of time today shopping for various things for the next / future trips to WDW and elsewhere. I really liked the Universal Studios 10x10 mini messenger bag as a theme park bag, especially along with the packable backpack which helped with clothing overflow. The messenger bag is big enough for umbrellas and water bottles and has various padded sections. I am really pretty upset about how badly my ancient DVC backpack performed on this trip. The zippers opened up on me and dumped stuff out while in the airport. The water bottles I use now are smaller than the mesh side water bottle holders (which are generously sized for Nalgene type bottles, which I no longer use), so those got dumped out, too. On the good side, there’s no stray metal in the DVC backpack to set off alarms. But dumping the contents of the things in the side compartments AND the main compartment is a bit much. I can adapt to the zipper problem (by leaving the zippers parked all the way to one side) but I don’t particularly want to because I like opening a pack at the top. So I looked at a bunch of options online and then impulsively purchased something Ahsoka themed at Heroes and Villains. We’ll see how that goes. I’m going to aggressively track it this time and complain early if it is slow to arrive. There is no reward for patience when it comes to e-commerce from specialty websites.

Then I spent a ridiculous amount of time Once Again shopping for a main bag. I used an ancient small rolling duffel that I bought probably a decade ago to bring souvenirs home in from WDW. The wheels are not bad, and the bag itself is very light, but the handle is too short; it is uncomfortable to use. I love the bag I bought for A. (travelpro compact carryon hardside I think it’s the Lite or something like that) and I was tempted to buy a duplicate for myself, but in the end, I have ordered a different Travelpro (in imperial purple, instead of orchid purple pink) that is softsided and somewhat lighter. If the specifications are to be believed, it is lighter than A.’s American Tourister underseater, that I have occasionally used and might have used this trip except I found that rolling duffel in basement and decided to try it out. A. is able to manage her own spinner and luggage-sleeve-attached-bag-on-top part of the time; if she’s overwhelmed, she can’t. ETA: If I have a nearly-identical height/behavior luggage setup, I am hoping I can manage both without stress (other than on escalators, but if A. is having a meltdown, I could just do elevators with her). The rolling duffel plus A.’s stack have a big enough height difference that it is a problem.

If the Imperial Purple does not come back into stock, I will probably buy the same bag in a different color; the style I picked has the magnatrac wheels and I kinda want to try those out and see if they are actually different.

ETA:

In addition to backpack / main bag shopping, I also ordered a couple of knock-off bandolier style phone holders. This is really -specifically- for UO, because they really want all your crap in the locker and then not having your phone while in line is a problem, and A. worries (correctly) about phone in shorts pocket falling out on the ride. I have a travel vest with zip pockets that fixes this mostly, but I fucking hate the vest, because I bought the lightest scottevest, it has too many of the wrong type of pockets, I don’t like the color (because it shows dirt very quickly), I tend to put it on inside out and then not understand why the pockets are in the wrong spot, and it is the wrong size, because while scottevest makes many of their vests in a really wide range, this particular one they do not. Obviously, the entire shopping day started with trying to fix _this_ problem, but I will not know if I succeeded until the vest I ordered arrives (far fewer pockets, a much prettier color, probably slightly too big if anything, _which is good_ in a layering piece) and if that vest does not work I am very uncertain what my second choice vest would be (I do not really want to pay scottevest prices for the men’s version of the lightweight vest because that won’t fix any of the myriad problems I have with it other than size and honestly might not fix the size problem either).

I also ran across some bonne maman single serve squeezers in a reasonable quantity, so I ordered those. I did the GG order for the next trip. I ordered some replacement slides for ones that are quite worn, and a new pair of Propets for A.

Finally, and honestly, I’m still not sure entirely why, I decided that as long as I am fixing every other problem associated with packing for complicated travel, I might as well fix the Purse for Going Out to Dinner Problem. I checked Nordstrom’s for what the current Look is, and learned a new word: Minaudiere. I am not packing a Minaudiere. Come on. So I gave up on any current Look, and went for, floppy and soft for maximum packability, with extra consideration given to any solution that is supposed to wrinkle on the theory that will camouflage packing related wrinkles. And that’s how I learned about Japanese Knot Bags. I got a really pretty one that had a color name of “Brown”, but it looks lustrously bronze to me; we’ll see what it’s like in real life when it arrives.

I’ll try to keep this short. If I fail, I’ll retitle this as A Few Remarks, to warn people better.

Years ago, I posted about the conflict between hotel union workers desire for hotel union work — notably, housekeeping — to continue as before, and the desire for a lot of us to be a lot easier on the environment by reducing the amount of cleaning, of towels, sheets, etc.

I was reminded of this when a friend sent me a link about Clean the World (https://thehustle.co/the-surprising-afterlife-of-used-hotel-soap/amp/); it’s a great circular economy article, and you can find additional coverage about Clean the World in the usual places like waste360 and similar. I thought, hey, I wonder what the long term impact of the last few years have been on the hotel housekeeping dynamic? Answer: daily housekeeping went away, and is now mostly staying away. There is some opt-in, and luxury brands have retained more frequent housekeeping, but the default has definitely moved in the direction I wanted it to go. And yes, the union workers are complaining. This is absolutely going to be another boomer v. Millenial thing. Term of the day: skimpflation.

Sample coverage: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hotels-end-basic-amenities-no-more-housekeeping-skimpflation/

I’ll probably be back with more skimpflation, if it is being used elsewhere, but may be a different post if it is broadly used outside this one area / author.

It was a nice, normal Saturday. I took T. to martial arts and then we had breakfast at Vic’s.

F. came over for an in person piano lesson, because everyone is healthy at the same time.

R. went out to a show (10 pm) and saw someone he hasn’t seen in a very long time and they chatted. People were well behaved and there was a good number of people there.

Meanwhile, I have been continuing the conversations with people about vacation planning. I have specific things planned through April, but at the end of January, that’s a really short planning horizon for me. Specifically, we are 11 months-ish away from next winter break. So I started doing points calculations and talked to my sister and we have put together a plan.

Also, I got in touch with my sister S. and we have nailed down a weekend in June for us to go to LegoLand NY with her kids, and with A.

Also, I looked up how many points I transferred from DVC into RCI because I was otherwise going to lose them, and turned a little over half of those points into a long weekend on the Cape next fall.

Having reached an agreement with T. that if, this summer, it is too onerous / worrisome to travel internationally, I started brainstorming possible US road trips. One possibility is to meet my sister at her not-MILs in Michigan and do stuff there, maybe do Hershey on the way over or back, stuff like that. Not looking promising, as the time frame she is going will overlap with the kids’ camp plans.

Then I looked up the current rules for Canada, downloaded ArriveCan and entered passport and vax info for the four of us. This is _probably_ a do-able trip in the summer, but it’s our second choice. Thus, I looked up the current rules for the Netherlands, and, whoooeeee, that is a _lot_. They had a hard lockdown over the winter break. I think my criteria for traveling to Europe may be, when I can enter my info into EUDCC and participate in their “normal” system, I’d be happy to go, but that’s probably not the full list of criteria because I find the thought of a transatlantic flight wearing a mask the whole time to be more than a little daunting. Perhaps I will get over it some time soon. I know other people are capable of this, but the prospect of trying to convince my kids to leave their masks on, and the collective probable grumpiness makes me super uneasy.

I had to read it to understand the term. Once I did, I was like, I’ve been doing that for years. Not every trip! But for about a decade, I was taking the family to visit one of R.’s two sisters for T-weekend or Christmas or both. And they didn’t even want to start talking about what the plan was until September at the earliest. Of course by then, the Residence Inns closest to them / with the nicest rooms / with the 2 bedroom suites were all booked up. So I started booking the Residence Inn we liked in both locations for both T-weekend and Christmas, and then as soon as I found out what the real plan was, I canceled everything that we were not going to use. I didn’t feel bad about it, because I usually canceled by mid-October (end of October was usually the latest, altho I think we went into November for a Christmas stay once), and the whole issue was that they were fully booked by the holidays. Those rooms, once released, would be used.

I’ve also booked a hotel for a DisneyLand stay while waitlisted for Grand Californian. I didn’t ever cancel the hotel, because GCV waitlisting failed. Good thing I stacked!

More recently, I have a speculative trip coming up in the spring, which would definitely involve visiting my sister, but which might involve meeting up with cousins as well. I had booked a hotel near my sister, and also one in DC proper, and I figured I would make adjustments if needed (I might have wanted all or almost all of the rooms, if I was going to also be supplying rooms to the cousins — I really did not know). I recently learned that the cousins are definitively not going, so I canceled all of the hotels, moved the trip to a different location (but still do-able for my sister’s family) and got a VRBO instead. But this is canceling more than 90 days out, so no worries. I also had ground transportation lined up ; I canceled all of that, too. I had carefully made sure that the train tickets were bought at a level that would fully refund.

I did _not_ trip stack for another future trip, when I thought two nights would be in a different location. In the event, the reason for those two nights evaporated, and I didn’t have a stay in the other place I wanted to be. It was difficult to recover from that, but it worked out.

Honestly, “trip stacking” is not that implausible a thing to do, if one’s trip plans are dependent upon the whims of others, who have not yet made up their mind. I know, I could just never travel in a way that would depend upon others’ delayed choices, but also, I live in a Real World, in which the people I actually love don’t necessarily have the ability to plan things as far in advance as would be helpful for my purposes. This way, I don’t need to apply pressure to them.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/tips/trip-stacking-bookings-covid-cancelations/

I do not do package tours. However, I recognize that for a lot of people, they make sense: they simplify things, make it easier for large groups to travel together, ensure a minimum standard that can be difficult to manage at the same price independently, etc. But wow, Thomas Cook going under and leaving a lot of people stranded is a helluva thing. There is insurance (ATOL, I know nothing about it), so that is something.

But I cannot help but wonder what it all means. Is this the first of a wave of Brexit related collapses? Is this another in a line of travel companies suffering from global competition? Is this what happens when the government says, we will not help you out with emergency funding (even tho perhaps that would have been cheaper than NOT helping out? We will not really know until later, if ever)? I expect a tsunami of coverage in the next few days.