100 billion reasons why to fly Air Facebook. (Did I just feel the planet shift?)

So…maybe it IS time I get off My Space. I have been wondering where everybody went.

 

As A. Wannabe Travelwriter, I have made an attempt to follow the winds of social media, especially as how it relates to travel.

 

Clearly, Facebook—like a number of other online sites—while not quite yet sounding the death knell for the written guidebook—has surely changed the landscape of how we do our travel planning, as well as what we do when we get to our destination.

 

Thus, I was not so surprised a few weeks ago when I read an article about how people are “hooking up” via social media sites—Facebook in particular—when making airline reservations.

 

 

   

 

At least two airlines were quick to take advantage of how we use Facebook in our daily lives.

“Dutch carrier KLM began testing a program it calls Meet and Seat, allowing passengers to upload details from their Facebook and use the data to choose seatmates.”

“Malaysia Airlines introduced MHBuddy, an application that allows users who book and check in via the carrier’s Facebook page to see whether any of their ‘friends’ will be on the same flight or in their destination city at the same time.”

 

This method of planning for air travel assumes at least two important facts; the first is that you have not been making up personal details about yourself, where you really look a lot more like Michael Moore than George Clooney.

 

And two, you have any desire, whatsoever, to let the hundreds of random people who are somehow on your list of Facebook Friends, even know where you are going, let alone wish to spend your travel time with them.

 

I personally don’t see myself making use of these travel applications, but you can bet good money—maybe even 100 billion dollars of it—that many others will.

 

While I am not an expert on planetary astrophysical dynamics, does anybody else find it a very strange coincidence that the same weekend Jedi social media guru Mark Zuckerberg puts his epic IPO on the table, there is a shift in the interplanetary movements, where for at least a short time, Facebook will even eclipse the light from the sun?

 

   

 

May the Force be with Facebook and the market with the rest of us.

Travel to Greece via New York could be messy if it involves a broome.

I am pretty sure the painful groan came from me, since I don’t think we even own one of those talking scales.

 

But, the sharp sigh was enough to encourage the wife-person to steal a peek at the dial as it rapidly flew past the double digits, and then whiz through the 100’s, until the indicator shuttered and settled on the lower end of the 200’s.

 

Hey, it was the very lower end!

 

Since that time, my beer and pizza preference has been supplanted by a lot of Greek yogurt, which is supposedly good for me.

 

Not to complain—O.K. I’m complaining—but, must that stuff taste like some combination of the olden days, elementary school library paste and the dreaded (at least, by me) Hawaiian luau poi?

(The latter is described as “a glutinous purple paste made from pounded taro root,” if that doesn’t sound utterly unappetizing.)

 

      

 

Most of what I hear in the news about Greece is their faltering economy and political woes that threaten their expulsion from the European Union (E.U.) and disassociation from the common currency, the Euro.

 

But, this morning the news of the latest in Greek discombobulation involved a rather large truck that spilled its load of, in English measurement, 36,000 pounds—or in Euros, about 18 tons—of, yes, you guessed it, Greek yogurt.

 

       

 

This tragic incident clearly may require me to, at least temporarily, revert back to my beer and pizza diet—and by temporarily I mean hopefully forever, that is if the wife-person does not happen to notice there is no reduction whatsoever in the Greek yogurt supply at our local Safeway.

 

I am not sure which type of clean-up equipment is required for a 36,000-pound yogurt spill, but the accident (and I am not making this up) occurred in Broome County, New York.

 

No, really.

 

        

My mom was a feeder, not a foodie.

Sometimes a gourmet meal means stopping for a burger on the way home.

 

As numerous previous blog posts revealed, it might have seemed that I was somewhat of a Anthony Bourdain groupie.

 

Given all the free press I provided his No Reservations travel foodie television show, it even seemed that way to me sometimes, and by “free” I mean I didn’t get diddly for all the e-ink I poured out in their behalf.

 

But, truth-be-told, the show used to send out pre-show packets via email to a select group of global adventure humor websites, and by “select” I mean anyone willing to give the show the time of day and a little electronic promotion with no chance in hell for any form of remuneration.

 

This gave any semi-lazy travel adventure bloggers a relatively painless pre-made blog post—not that I know any lazy bloggers until I look in the mirror the next time.

 

So, it is no coincidence that when the No Reservations folks quit sending out the pre-program publicity, I quit blogging about the show.

 

But, I still do watch the program, and the other night included a typical segment where they film some young new-age chef, presumably knowledgeable in molecular gastronomy and fusion cooking, uncomfortably hunched over as they carefully place near-microscopic pieces of some unrecognizable food-like ingredients on enormous pure-white plates.

 

 

 

Two things I assume you can count on if you ever eat at one of the fine dining establishments employing these meticulous chefs: one, you will likely leave quite a bit lighter in the wallet, as there seems to be an inverse relationship between the minuscule portion size and massive financial impact to the bill.

 

The second assumption is, you will similarly leave a little lighter having consumed less calories in what is presented as your meal, than you burned in just the walk to and from the expensive curbside valet parking.

 

Given that today is Mother’s Day and both my lovely mother and my wonderful mother-in-law are no longer with us, I can only recall all the millions of meals they provided us through hundreds upon hundreds of hours of cooking.

 

I guarantee no one ever left one of those home cooked meals with a growling stomach and an overwhelming need to stop at the nearest fast food emporium.

 

Thanks moms, for that.

 

And a gazillion other things.

My apparent conflict at the airport. PDX to SMF

What’s wrong with this picture.

Hint: check the boarding pass order number and the magazine title.

I guess I”m too cheap to be reading Conde Nast, yet willing to pay for an exit row seat and a “free” drink.

Cheers

 

(If you can’t make it out, the magazine in the picture is Budget Travel, and my boarding pass is group A, position 1 (in other words, the first person to board the plane).

Just because I can’t soar with the eagles doesn’t mean I can’t crawl with the chickens.

No chickens were harmed in the making of this blog post.

 

(I wish I could say the same about your esteemed author.)

 

What was I thinking?

 

I paid thirty bucks for the privilege to get up at first light and then drive an hour, just to join a mob trying to catch a 170 pound chicken.

 

   

 

And what masochists insist in calling these self-inflicted maltreatments, “fun runs?”

 

But, there was a $100 bounty offered to the first runner who could catch the clucker.

 

Apparently, it has never been done, so I was starting to wonder if there was either a running ringer in there, or possibly  it was some super-duper, steroid-strengthened freak fowl.

 

   

 

Given my propensity to start these runs slowly…and then taper off, I got way back by the “12+ min/mi” pace sign.

 

If I’ve done my math correctly, my one mile per hour pace is a 12+ min\mi pace—with emphasis on the “+”—right?

 

   

 

When it was all over but the shoutin’ (mostly me yelling that I hurt all over) the chicken, once again, eluded capture, so it was veggie burgers all around.

 

With a side of Advil, if you please.

 

Fun run, my ass. (Yeah, that hurt, too.)

Can you have too much Fijian rum? I don’t think so, and no, that is not my Kentucky Derby haberdashery.

While I’m still surfing the wave of memories of all my Fiji fun, there are just too many tales to tell today.

 

  

 

I don’t want to wear you out before your weekend, what, with all of your Kentucky Derby and Cinco de Mayo plans.

 

Do they even make a tequila-based mint julep?

 

So, in the meantime, here is me modeling the latest (and probably the oldest) of Fijian headwear. But, for some reason, none of our wonderful Fijian hosts seem to be wearing one of these. As a matter of fact, no one else is wearing one of these.

 

   

 

Maybe it has something to do with all the liquid that used to reside in that bottle in the picture above.

 

And, after your wild weekend of revelry, should you awake with a super-sized headache, you can always blame it on the additional 14% of gravitational pull on your gray matter as a result of this Saturday night’s Super Moon.

 

Let the merrymaking commence.

My jet lag from all that world travel felt just like a hangover. Or, maybe it had something to do with those 37 hours of alcohol consumption.

The most reliable, time-tested “cure” for a case of mind-numbing jet lag is pretty much along the same lines as for a severe, head-splitting hangover.

 

Just stay home and don’t drink anything stronger than low-fat milk.

 

Of course, with that strategy you would miss seeing much of the planet’s special places. Or, an up-close and personal view of the inside of your floor-mounted, porcelain bathroom appliance.

 

As I have been intermittently reporting, I just got back from a dive trip to Fiji, which apparently is not really just around the corner.

 

At this point, I don’t clearly recall that anyone warned me that this trek would entail a three-hour drive for a one-hour flight, and then a ten-hour flight, which lead to a three-hour bus ride in the pouring rain on a windy island road, to get where we began a one-hour boat ride across a wind-whipped, lumpy sea, only to transfer to a rain-slicked small metal dingy, which took us almost all the way to the beach at the resort.

 

          

 

          

 

And, all of that doesn’t include the many hours spent at multiple airports, which includes getting X-rayed, magnetometered, patted and probed, and dizzy from watching the luggage carousel go round-and-round, while praying that my dive bag did not end up on Mt. Fuji instead of at our beach on Fiji.

 

The bottom line is, all that traveling added up to many hours across a multitude of time zones, which left us sleep deprived, succumbing to diet disasters, and generally mentally debilitated. Our bottom line was about 37 hours “pillow to pillow” (from the bed at our place to a bed at their place).

 

Or, as otherwise described: jet lagged.

 

By some strange happenstance, as if to taunt my compromised physical and mental state with preventive methods after it is too late, I came home to the latest edition of the Wellness Letter to which I subscribe. As if reading about getting in better shape will somehow trump poor eating and a lack of exercise.

 

One of the featured subjects for the month was, “Easing the Turbulence of Jet Lag.” You can link to the short article for yourself, but you have probably heard it all before:

 

1. Get to your destination late for eastward travel.

 

2. Before you leave, go to bed early for eastward travel and late for westward travel.

 

 

               

 

3. For a late flight, go right to sleep on the plane—as if you can ignore the constant stream of announcements, seat-belt demonstrations (REALLY…after all these years, you still have to show us this?), food and drink cart deliveries, and talkative seat neighbors.

 

         

 

 

4. “Drink enough.” (A lot more on that in a moment.)

 

           

 

 

5. Re-set your watch (assuming you are one of the three people on the airplane that even still wears a watch).

 

6. Expose yourself outside. (The last time I tried this suggested method, I promptly got arrested.)

 

                          

 

7. Take drugs. Sleeping pills, maybe not. Melatonin, maybe yes, but who knows?

 

     

 

8. Ignore diet cures. (Gee, I thought that those dozen Cinnabons I bought at the airport WAS to prevent jet lag.)

 

Of course, a couple of those preventative strategies require some knowledge of whether you are traveling eastward or towards the west. It is my experience that smart phones, Garmin and Google have pretty much replaced whatever comprehension of navigation most people never had, in the first place.

 

In that case, I suggest just skipping directly to method No. 4.

 

Personally, the whole concept of crossing multiple time zones leaves me to avail myself to “drink enough.”

 

Our flight from LAX left on a Thursday evening. We arrived in Fiji on the subsequent Saturday morning. The flight was just under ten hours.

 

You do the math…what happened to most of Friday?

 

Did I mention that we flew on Friday the 13th? (Cue the Twilight Zone intro.)

 

On the return flight, we left Fiji on Saturday night, crossed the largest ocean on earth, and got home mid-day Saturday; yes, the same Saturday! In other words, we got home before we even left.

 

Talk about a rift in the space-time continuum. Anyone got Stephen Hawking’s phone number?

 

Is it any wonder why I “drink enough” while doing all this trans-global gallivanting?

 

We scuba divers log our dives for future reference—like, was it ten or twelve times I had to pee in my wetsuit during that dive?

 

So, for this trip, I decided to log my beverage consumption, just to make sure that I would “drink enough.”

 

• The night before we left I had a wee dram of whisky (as in Scotch).

 

• At our first airport, I ordered my requisite Bloody Mary (Absolut vodka, a double, as I recall).

 

• On the SWA flight to LAX, they had a special on a gin & tonic, so what else could I do?

 

• I quaffed a drinkable red wine to accompany the fine airport cuisine at LAX.

 

• On the long Air Pacific flight, I sampled Fijian Bounty Red Label dark rum, which the label claims is “over-proofed.” I imbibed this high octane spirit, only slightly diluted with orange juice.

 

• At the airport in Nadi, I enjoyed my first—of many—local Fiji Bitter beer.

 

• En route we stopped at the Hare Krishna-inspired, Indian-influenced little town of Sigatoka where I purchased a bottle of the aforementioned Bounty rum.

 

As you can discern, world travel is not for the faint of heart, or for that matter, anyone leaning towards temperance.

 

Thank goodness, I do not suffer from either affliction.