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May 7, 2008
Some Random Notes From The Not-Quite-24 Hours I Just Spent In Toronto
 I'm back in Seattle after a quick jaunt to Toronto for a work event. It was one of those leave-Monday-morning, fly-home-Tuesday-evening kinds of things. I'm dehydrated, sick of plastic-wrapped airport sandwiches, and just plain beat.
As usual, the trip notes:
- This was my first time flying Northwest in a long, long time, and the early indication of the experience wasn't very encouraging. I got to Sea-Tac and found myself barked into a line that fed into another line that led to another line and, eventually, ended with my getting a boarding pass, achy feet, and relief from an overwhelming, fellow-passenger BO smell. As trip starts go, this wasn't auspicious.
- I will say that the woman who gave me the boarding pass and took my checked bag was really wonderful, but the people working the lines themselves shout orders like they've just retired from 40+ years in the correctional system. Memo to Northwest: your customer experience would improve if you'd just get it over already by putting tags in our ears and using cattle prods to move us along. Moooooo.
- I've learned to pack my own food on to the airplane these days; you never know if the airline will be serving anything, or even if they have those horrid $5 "snack boxes" for sale on the flight. My line-of-a-line-of-a-line experience being what it was, I was a bit behind the eight-ball on time and had to swoop in to a Starbucks for bottled water and a plastic-wrapped sandwich.
- (Mmmmmmm .... plastic-wrapped sandwich....)
- Sign That You Might Want To Choose Another Aircraft #22: The aircraft lavatory's under-sink paneling won't latch shut, meaning it swings open whenever the plane pitches up, closes rapidly when the plane pitches down, and smacks the holy hell out of your ankles in the process. Yikes.
- Before I left home, I'd used CosmoPod to grab a fantastic BBC documentary about the Gutenberg press off YouTube. It's in six parts, about an hour in total, and uttery wonderful. (Tip 'o the hat to Daring Fireball for the pointer.)
- My flight to Toronto had a short Minneapolis layover, which meant I was sprinting from my arrival to find the right departure gate. I eventually arrived, did a quick survey of the food options nearby, found the selection wanting, and settled on ... a plastic-wrapped ham and cheese sandwich. With a Diet Coke.
- (Mmmmmmm .... plastic-wrapped sandwich....)
- I had about 10 minutes before boarding, so I decided to do a quick bit of work on my laptop. So there I am, using Publishing Layout View in Word 2008, merrily zooming around my document, when the guy sitting three seats to my right finally breaks his not-remotely-subtle staring at my screen to ask - very politely - what software I'm working with. I explain that it's the new Word 2008, show him a bit about what it can do, and suddenly I'm Ron Popeil giving an 8-minute infomercial for Mac Office. The guy's asking questions, I'm showing off features, he's smiling, I'm smiling, and we're both really enjoying it. Then the boarding call goes off, we both get up, and that's that. A totally random moment of mutual-geek enthusiasm.
- (You know, I don't think I ever mentioned that I worked for Microsoft, either.)
- In contrast to the cattle-call experience of the Seattle-Minneapolis trip, the Minneapolis-Toronto leg was sparse. The flight attendants seemed beside themselves with such a small passenger list, and lavished tons of personal attention on everyone. It was like a free first-class upgrade, but without the booze, legroom, and warm cashews.
- (Which, I guess on the re-reading, means the flight wasn't like business class at all. Ah, well.)
- On the flight to Toronto, I was seated behind a couple of hipster-ish, late-twentysomething Canadian geek professionals who chattered on between themselves for the entire flight. And man, I gotta tell ya - and this from one who's married to a Canuck - Canadians say "eh" an awful lot.
- The Toronto airport is very nice, very clean, and the Canadian customs people are thorough and polite.
- One nice thing about in-n-out trips: no real jet lag, and no need to try to acclimate. Sure, you're up at 4 AM Pacific time or whatever on the morning of, but it's only for one day. It made me feel very Pacific Standard Tribal.
- We had a weird cab-related snafu on the way home - namely, the nice receptionist called one, it arrived, and then the driver informed us that he "didn't go to the airport" and was "local only." I confess to being totally baffled by this - whaaaat?, but the driver promised to radio for another cab that could take care of us. We said OK, the cab drives off, we wait 5, 10 minutes - no new cab. So we got reception to call for another one, which arrived very quickly, and, thankfully, wasn't afraid of going near aircraft. But still - WTF? Does Toronto have some crazy non-cabies that drive around and just punk people?
- I'd been making jokes for much of the trip about Tim Horton's - a Candian fast-food chain known for its yummy coffee - and implying that my Tuesday dinner choice was likely to be limited to the 'Tim Horton's at the airport.' Well, it turns out that there is one at the Toronto Airport (see photo). Problem is, it was on the other side of the security perimeter, which meant that I was unable to complete my passive-aggressive Canadian joke by, you know, actually getting a bite there.
- Fortunately, I was able to buy - you guessed it - a plastic-wrapped sandwich from a kiosk right next to the gate. I swear I am not making this up.
- White wine is a great thing at to drink when flying.
- After buying a few different magazines at the airport, I can confidently say that Esquire > GQ > Details. Details, in fact, has very little reason to live.
- When I was in Minneapolis, CNN reported that Barack Obama had won North Carolina. This made me happy.
- I found seat 38D on the Minneapolis-Seattle home stretch, sat down, and promptly managed to lose the Monster cable adapter that allows me plug my iPhone into regular headphones - which pretty much meant I was hosed in the "gee, I'd like to watch a movie in-flight" department. I don't know whether to blame Steve Jobs' design decision (a recessed headphone jack? Really?), my own butterfingered ineptitude, or the strange vortex that somehow magically spirited away the jack to the land of lost keys, ball-point pens, and tchotkes.
- We arrived in Seattle about a half-hour late, which put us really close to midnight. All "Pacific Standard Tribe" posturing aside, that's a really long day.
Damn, it's good to be home.
Posted by Gavin Shearer at May 7, 2008 8:38 AM. Posted to Travel.
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nice to see your blogging hiatus has ended
Posted by: purple at May 7, 2008 1:04 PM
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