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Travel

Stuff related to various trips

Aviation geekery: Rainy early morning PDX departure

Rob Griffiths
Dec 22 '13
[Flying, General, Photography, Technology, Travel]
Comments

Earlier this fall, the FAA decided to allow use of electronics below 10,000 feet on flights. As an aviation geek, this was great news; not because I could now use my iPod or whatever all the time, but because I could use my camera to record takeoffs and landings.

In particular, I think takeoffs are amazing events, wherein a huge multi-ton semi-controllable beast of a machine on the ground transforms itself into a powerful and graceful master of the skies, seemingly weighing nothing and covering vast distances at over 500 miles an hour. But I wax off-topic…

I don’t fly all that often any more, and yesterday was my first flight since the rule changes went into effect. It was also a very early departure (5:40am takeoff), so it was pitch black outside. Plus it was overcast and a bit rainy.

Nonetheless, I couldn’t let the opportunity pass me by, so I recorded the takeoff and initial climb out of Portland. There’s even a bit of commentary, for the sake of my daughter sitting next to me.

(For the best visual experience, click the gear icon to choose 1080p, and then zoom to full screen.)

Despite the darkness and rain (or perhaps because of it), I find the resulting video to be mesmerizing…but that’s mostly because I am an aviation geek, and love this stuff. If you’d like the technical details behind the video, keep reading.

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A visit to an amazing aviation museum

Rob Griffiths
Dec 15 '12
[Flying, Photography, Travel]
1 Comment

evergreenlogoIf you’re an aviation enthusiast (as I am), and you’re ever in Oregon, you owe yourself a trip to the Evergreen Air and Space Museum.

Despite living here for nearly 20 years, I’d never been until last week. The kids had a day off school, and we had some tickets we’d bought during a fundraiser for OMSI, so we went and made a day of it.

The museum has a large collection (100+) of aircraft, all in impeccable shape. In addition, there’s quite a collection of space memorabilia, including a full-size Titan rocket. The star attraction, though, is the Spruce Goose, Howard Hughes’ massive flying boat. There’s also a waterpark whose key feature is four water slides that drop out of the side of an actual 747, which sits on top of the water park’s building. Our passes included cockpit access to the Spruce Goose as well as a tour of the cockpit of the 747 sitting on top of the waterpark.

As you might expect of an aviation enthusiast, I snapped a ton of pictures. The more bearable of my efforts can be seen in this album (set to open in a new window). You can navigate with the on-screen buttons, the arrow keys, or by clicking directly on each image; you can also resize your browser window, and the image sizes will adjust.

If you enjoy all things aviation, you should put the Evergreen Air and Space Museum on your list; it’s definitely worth the time and effort it takes to get there.

Photos from our summer tour

Rob Griffiths
Nov 12 '10
[Photography, Travel]
Comments

After posting about my favorite roads from our summer tour around the west, a few people asked to see some pictures. Here’s an album showing some of the interesting sites and landscapes:

Summer Tour 2010

It really was an amazing journey—4,000 miles in about 18 driving days, plus another 700 miles during a one-week stay in Colorado to visit friends and relatives. More about the trip, in particular spending that much time in a car with two young children, in a future post.

These are a few of my favorite roads…

Rob Griffiths
Nov 12 '10
[Auto, General, Travel]
1 Comment

Last summer, we took our two girls on a 30-day, 4,000-mile trek around the western United States (here’s the full route). The trip was made possible by my wife’s employer, where everyone is given a multi-week sabattical after 10 years of service.

Our kids are relatively young for such a journey–just four and seven at the time of the trip. To make it bearable for them (and us!), we drove relatively short distances each day, and spent a mostly-driving-free week in Colorado in the middle of the trip. (More on the lessons we learned traveling for 30 days straight with two young kids in a future blog post…)

What was great about the trip, for the adults in the car at least, was that relatively little time was spent on interstate highways–only 1,200 of the 4,000 miles, and of those 1,200 miles, 900 of them were on the first three days and the last day of the trip. So most of the time, we were on state highways or even smaller backroads. These are the roads where you can really see the country, and get away from the crowds–many times we had the road completely to ourselves.

Given how much we enjoyed these roads, I thought I’d take a few minutes and share some of my favorites from the journey. (Click the small map image for the full Google Maps view (in a new window) of each road.)
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Trip report: Destin, Florida

Rob Griffiths
Jul 21 '09
[Flying, Sports, Travel]
2 Comments

Last week, we took the kids to a family reunion in Destin, Florida. For those who’ve never been (as I hadn’t prior to last week), here are some observations from my experiences.

  • Highway 98, the main arterial road that runs up and down the peninsula, is seemingly always crowded. This is especially true on Saturday and Sunday. We sent some folks on a grocery run to a Sam’s Club when we arrived on Saturday. It was 16 miles away, and it took them nearly an hour to get there. The rental office was five miles from the bridge where we crossed to the peninsula, and it took nearly 20 minutes to cover that distance.
  • The sand (at least on Crystal Beach, which is where we stayed) is simply astonishing. Pure white and very soft, with nary a hard shell to poke you in the foot.
  • The water temp near the surface was 80F+, and very pleasant. Waves are generally small, but large enough for the kids to enjoy some boogie boarding. We went scuba diving one day (though Destin isn’t the greatest of dive destinations), doing two relatively short dives (as they were somewhat deep). One decent picture at right.
    The water temp was about 73F to 77F at 60 to 85 feet; we wore 3mm wet suits, which kept us warm enough for the two dives.

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San Juan to Dallas in-flight images

Rob Griffiths
Aug 30 '08
[Flying, Travel]
2 Comments

The following will probably only be of interest to aviation buffs–so if that’s not you, you can stop reading now :).

My wife and I recently took a week to go scuba diving in Bonaire. I’ll be posting more about that trip shortly, but getting to and from Bonaire from Portland, Oregon, isn’t exactly simple. There’s an overnight Continental flight that leaves out of Houston once a week, but neither of us enjoy such flights, so that was out. We wound up flying to Dallas (on an MD-80), then to San Juan, Puerto Rico (757-200WL), and then on to Bonaire (ATR-72). On the way down, we spent a night in Dallas, but coming home, we did it as one (long) 20-hour day.

While flying home, I snapped a number of pictures of the various islands we flew over–starting with the Turks and Caicos Islands and ending as we flew over the Bahamas. I found the mix of clouds, shadows, land, sky, and water to make for some very interesting images. None of these are award-winners (I was using my Canon 850is again, and there are often reflections in the window), but I just loved the colors.

As noted, more on Bonaire later–including a review of the island as a destination for scuba divers, as well as some of my underwater images from the week’s dives.

More bad pictures

Rob Griffiths
Jul 12 '07
[Photography, Travel]
1 Comment

It was my birthday last Sunday, and my wife gave me a free pass to go out and about for a good chunk of the day while she watched the girls. So I packed up my new camera, and headed out to the Columbia River Gorge via the back roads. I drove a really big loop–about 250 miles total–up the Washington side of the Gorge on highway 14, then up highway 141 to Trout Lake. I followed 141 until the pavement turned into gravel, then turned around–my little MR2 is quite fun to drive, but “good ground clearance” is not on its list of attributes. Along the way, I stopped occasionally to snap some landscape photos.

Route 141 ends pretty much directly across from Hood River, and just down the road a touch is one of the more popular launching spots for Gorge windsurfers–as you can see by the number of vehicles in this Google Maps overhead view. So I took my camera and went and sat near the water’s edge for a while, taking pictures of the action with the 300mm zoom. The Gorge is one of the most popular windsurfing spots in the country, and the wind was howling on Sunday morning–there must’ve been close to 100 windsurfers out on the water. I was hoping to see more freestyle wave jumpers, but alas, I only caught one shot of anyone in the air.

As you can tell by the images, I’m still pretty bad at this DSLR stuff. I’m having fun learning, but I just haven’t had enough time to get out and shoot pictures while experimenting with the many modes the camera offers. At least we have some wonderful scenery around here that prevents the pictures from being completely terrible. (And next time, I’ll remember to set the camera in RAW mode, so I can do more post-shot image correction when I get home!)

Free time at San Francisco International

Rob Griffiths
Jun 16 '07
[Flying, Photography, Travel]
1 Comment

747 approachingMy Friday flight home from WWDC (San Francisco [SFO] to Portland [PDX]) wasn’t set to depart until 9:15pm, probably putting me in the door around midnight. In an effort to get home somewhat sooner, I headed to the airport around 5pm, as there was a 6:15ish flight to PDX, and I thought maybe I could get on that one instead.

However, when I reached their gate, the departure board indicated “delayed,” and the estimated new departure time was 9:40pm–well after my booked flight’s departure. With no pressing requirements for the next four hours, I made my way to the end of the C concourse, where I had a good view of the planes taxiing by–as well as a view, though quite far away, of landings on runways 28L and 28R.

Thinking simply “I wonder if someone will come question me about this,” I got out the Nikon, attached the 70/300mm zoom, and started snapping pix. Amazingly, over the course of an hour’s worth of picture taking, I was completely ignored by Homeland Security. (The first few images were snapped from a café near the international terminal, outside the concourse proper.)

The pictures may only be of interest if you’re a true aviation nut; most aren’t even that good. I do like, however, the nose-on shot of the China Airlines 747, which was snapped as it maneuvered on the taxiways just outside the concourse. It makes a most impressive desktop image when cropped to fit 1920×1200! (As always, if you ever want a full-size version of any image, just ask.)

Overheard on the street…

Rob Griffiths
Jun 14 '07
[Travel]
2 Comments

It seems that everyone walking around here in San Francisco is connected to something–if it’s not an iPod, it’s a cell phone (with or without headset). As I was walking back to the hotel last night, a sharply-dressed woman was walking towards me, talking quite loudly to someone via her cell phone’s Bluetooth headset.

Her voice was loud enough that there was absolutely no way I couldn’t hear what she was saying, in a most animated fashion. To the best of my memory, this is exactly what she said:

Listen Danny … I said listen! … they don’t know about any of that, really! They can’t. There’s no way!
pause while Danny is obviously saying something
Oh Danny! Give it a break! You watch way too much CSI! They simply can’t know…

And then she was passed and on her way, leaving me wondering just exactly what they had been discussing–a friend suggests she may have been rehearsing lines for a play or TV show. I’m going to go with that thought, as she clearly wasn’t too concerned about anyone overhearing her conversation!

A different kind of paging…

Rob Griffiths
Jun 10 '07
[Flying, Travel]
Comments

It’s Sunday morning as I sit here in this San Francisco airport café, having just arrived on my flight from Portland for this week’s WWDC. The flight itself was fine–the air was smooth, the plane was lightly loaded, and I had an entire row to myself. Without being in first class, it just doesn’t get much better than that!

However, just before we pushed back from the gate in Portland, I heard this on the plane’s PA system: “Rob Griffiths, please press your flight attendant call button.” Uh oh. Talk about a quick way to elevate one’s heart rate–nothing like an on-board page to accomplish that! A sampling of thoughts that ran through my head: “Uh oh, what happened to one of our kids!?” … “I bet I left something at home, like my luggage, and my wife is calling to let me know” … “They figured out that their online check-in tool shouldn’t have let me move from the cheap seats up into Economy Plus?” [I was able to jump from row 22 to row 8 without any trouble] … “Was there something in my carry-ons that they’ve just now discovered to be dangerous?” … “Someone saw me taking pictures of the airplanes from the concourse windows and called security” … “I always wondered what happens when someone is asked to press their flight attendant call button; looks like I get to find out!”

After all that (and more) had run through my head for a couple of minutes, the flight attendant showed up and simply said: “Ah, thank you–we just wanted to make sure you were on the plane. Didn’t want to leave without you!” Whew, no emergency, no trouble. But then I began to wonder…how come they didn’t already know I was on the plane? After all, I had handed them my boarding pass at the top of the jetway, they had scanned it through their boarding system, and I heard the thing go “beep.”

The only thing I can think of is that by jumping from steerage into Economy Plus (or whatever my airline calls it), I somehow confused their system. Perhaps the gate agent did something special to let me claim my ‘upgraded’ seat–the flight was quite empty after all–and that somehow ‘lost’ me in the system? Whatever the reason, it was just a bit disconcerting to find myself ‘lost’ in an airplane despite having had my boarding pass scanned prior to boarding!

In any event, I’m here now, and have a free day to explore the city and its surroundings and take some pictures with the new camera. Tomorrow things get busy, with the (public) keynote talk in the morning and then a number of “state of the union” presentations in the afternoon, and a reception in the evening. I’m hoping that there are at least one or two real ‘wow’ secret features revealed in Leopard, as I’m not overly impressed at the moment (based on the features shown on Apple’s OS X pages). We’ll know one way or the other in about 24 hours!

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