Category Archives: Travel

There seems to be a couple of Minneapoli.  There is the upscale, wealthy, cosmopolitan Minneapolis.  The number of white tablecloth restaurants here is remarkable.  Chefs are known by name and their creations are monitored closely by the glitterati: “He’s using truffle oil infusions since his trip to Aix…”.  A Mercedes Benz dealer says he can’t get enough stock, fast enough to keep up with demand.

The other Minneapolis is the more modest.  Overheard in the hotel dining room:  “I don’t like it when those people on television use that word, a-s-s.  It’s just not seemly.”  This was said by a 40-ish man and woman, eating a meal.  Judging by the burr of their accent, they weren’t from Minneapolis metro proper, but perhaps from the smaller towns around the area. 

So, we’re confronted with a city that is ‘citified’ as well as ‘countrified’  As a general guideline, you don’t see Minneapolis on “COPS”.  If Toronto is New York City, run by the Swiss, then Minneapolis is Toronto run by the Norwegians.  They seem to take their differentness as a given; the reserve and politeness of the Midwest is endemic here.

The ‘burbs.  The ‘burbs of Chicago no less.  A nice little community trisected by eight lane interstate width roads.  Accents?  Imagine George Wendt doing “Da Bears” and you’re not far from wrong.  It is easy to identify the native Chicagoans when they speak.  A kind of Midwestern burr with a touch of NYC.  Milwaukee accents are just a bit thicker.  But really nice folks.  Interested in me being from “Canader”  Some wonderment that I would come all this way to teach, then I remind them that Ottawa is only a two-hour flight from here.  Perhaps it is the American Insularity Gene kicking up a fuss. 

I’ll wait to critique the food when I’m in downtown Chicago at our office in The Loop. (On Wacker Drive, no less)  Downer’s Grove is essentially a bedroom community where people live here and work elsewhere.

It has also been raining like Noah’s Wet Dream.  Some underpasses were flooded this morning, so some students were delayed as traffic essentially ground to a halt when some of the freeways were clogged with dead cars and soaking wet occupants. 

Downstate?  No one knows, no one cares.  Downstate might as well be the Moon.  But that’s the Chicago way: Canada is more approachable than Springfield or any other downstate place.

I think I may have come up with the WHY to explain the airline financial crisis.  They’ve decided to become transportation companies, rather than what they really are, service companies.  A transport company worries about the lowest possible cost associated with moving a truck full of pineapples from A to B.  Or machine screws.  Or gravel. 

Air travel for humans is not a commodity item, or more correctly, should not be a commodity item.  When passengers treat it as one and airlines treat us a commodities that must be moved as inexpensively as possible, then the customer has no loyalty to the transporter.

A Service company, by contrast, recognizes that the customer has an infinite number of choices at cheaper or more expenses prices and tries to build customer loyalty by treating the customer well.  Hotels went through this in the 60’s.  Occupancy rates fell when the major chains, Howard Johnson and Holiday Inn at the time, got eaten alive by the Motel 6, Red Roof Inn, Best Western chains that offered low prices but limited service.  There are now choices in the hotel industry at just about every price point from dirt cheap basic bed, bath and TV, to decadent rooms that have more luxe than most can be expected to stand.  You choose which you prefer. 

Airlines are about to go through that unpleasantness.  Until they recognize that treating all their customers as extraordinarily powerful consumers who can dictate the airlines’ fortunes on a whim, airlines will be running to Washington and Ottawa and Bonn and London with their hands out crying the fiscal blues.  The governments should, but wont, say:  Screw ya.  Treat us nice and we’ll be loyal.  Give us a fair price for better service and we’ll stick with you.  A frequent flyer program is nice, but it really is nothing more than luggage tags with your name on it.  Big freakin’ whoopee!  I just want some room, a snack or a meal a drink and someone to talk to me like a human, not a five year old with ADD.  Until then, hey, lowest price rules. 

And if USAirways goes Tango Uniform, I can only wave “Buh Bye”  Serves them right

The Steel City is wrapped around the Allegheny Mountains.  A river sort of meanders down the middle.  But the mountains are the dominant feature, slicing neighbourhoods into valleys and slopes.  Everything is either up hill or down hill.  And its worse than San Francisco, where everything essentially falls towards the ocean. 

The blue collar ethic is strong here.  Polite, firm and willing to help their neighbours.  So, in many ways its a small town with taller buildings downtown.  However, it also has the world headquarters of H J Heinz, PPG Paint and a bunch of other big companies.  There is a world-class art gallery or two, a symphony orchestra that is world-renown and a couple of world-class hospitals.  Is it a blue collar town or a white collar town? 

The air is reasonably clean, so its not really a blue collar town in the traditional definition.  Most of the steel industry is gone, replaced with mini-mills that remelt scrap steel and need perhaps 1/10th of the staff and run at capacity all the time with essentially no emissions.  Pittsburgh is very green along the hills, with a canopy of trees everywhere except downtown. 

A city in transition with a heritage of work and effort.  Is that Pittsburgh?

After a while, in a heat wave, it gets just too hot.  New Jersey, Malvern, Dallas, even Phoenix, it just gets too hot after a while.  Air conditioned airports, cars and hotel rooms can only do so much.  Right now, Philly has equalled a record, 100 F.  The air is a semi-solid, perhaps worse than Los Angeles.  We need a two hour thunderstorm and a three-day rain to clean things out. 

Driving from Malvern to Harrisburg, crossing into the Susquehanna River Valley, you can see the thick leaden air.  A brownish hazy cloud with no start or end.  Just hanging there.

The lawns and fields are brown, victims of watering restrictions and no rain to measure.  Even the cows are languid, hiding under the trees to stay cool, laying on their bellies.  You can hear them from the Interstate….”Damn its hot. Yeah Bernice, it’s hot.  But its not the heat…its the humidity.  Bernice if you say that again, I’ll kick you one in the udder…” 

Even the cows are cranky.

There really is not a Malvern PA.  Its a suburb of Philadelphia, as Kanata is to Ottawa.  Essentially, NYC to Washington DC is one city, with the occasional one-acre field breaking it up.  This includes Philly and the suburbs. 

The big claim to fame here is the Valley Forge Historical area, which is a field with a museum and a half dozen artefacts that “George Washington may have been in the same area of, maybe, but we don’t know…”  Fortunately, the museum is free.  If I had paid for it, I’d be pissed big time. 

Oh, by the way, the world HQ for the QVC shopping network is down the road.  You can tour that too!  I won’t.  Its a nice enough area, but like any suburb of a major metropolis, it looks to the center city for its justification.  Looking to Philly for justification?  Hmmm…

A bunch of little villages that share a license plate office.  That’s New Jersey.  A basket of uncoordinated planners, highways and business districts that run from strip mall ugly to breathtakingly rural with a smattering of really grotesque industrial strips.  Welcome to the Garden State. 

I was in Piscataway, a more or less normal ‘burb with no real center town, bisected by freeways and turnpikes.  Turnpikes are just freeways with no on ramps.  Folks just drive on from the right, for the sheer hell of it, simply because the center median is a honkin’ big concrete Jersey barrier that Sir Edmund Hilary couldn’t climb.  Oh, and the limit is 65 mph even with houses not more than 20 feet from the turnpike. 

Berkeley Heights, where the office is, is an over-planned suburban industrial community.  Everything is deliberately planned, right down to the trees and shrubs.  Jersey is also the international hq for companies like Dow Jones, Bristol Myers Squibb, IBM and so on.  Houses are American-opulent and set back from the roads on tree lined roads. 

The folks, just fine, nice people who have a mix of small town kind and friendly with a New York edge.  Imagine a Minnesotan with a snotty attitude.  There ya have it!

OK, so I’m remiss in writing.  Dallas was a good show.  But the atmosphere?  Hotter than need be.  100 deg F.  But a dry heat. 

Hotel was off in the middle of nowhere, near nothing but a drainage ditch.  Renting a car is good.  MacArthur Rd. is the retail hub of Irving TX.  I hit three barbecue joints in five days.  Coulters is the best.  Dickey’s is second and Red, Hot and Blue just sucks. The ‘cue is Memphis style by way of Portland Oregon, or to put it another way, nothing to do with Memphis either. 

The rest of Dallas was too hot to be in during the daylight hours, so in early am, I go to Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas.  Texas Book Depository building, pure history all over.  With one exception.  The camera dies and nothing is open on a Sunday morning in downtown Dallas.  No extra batteries, so no pix, but the images are burned into the brain, so….

DFW Red Carpet Club?  The surliest people you’ve ever met.  Demanded to see ticket, Aeroplan card, passport and asked how long I intended to stay.  No smiles, no welcome, no politeness.  The rest of the whole state is friendly and polite as hospitable, except this one grumpy person.

Since I travel so much, I have decided to leave my mark in these hotel rooms I occupy while on the road.  Using the term Zen History, I’m leaving a trail in a very discreet and subtle way.  If you’re in a hotel, pull out the drawers in the night stand.  Turn them over.  If you find my initials there and the year, I’ve stayed in that room. 

The other giveaway is the pictures.  For years, where possible without causing destruction, I’ve inverted the wall art in hotels across the world.  If you find an upside down picture, check out the night table drawer bottoms.

There are other ways to contribute to Zen History.  For instance, in our kitchen, behind the fridge is a small section of unpainted wall.  As the kitchen is painted, I leave the date and my name.  Same with the wood crib and the deck.  Just a little date and name crumb of Zen History.  Who knows, somewhere, sometime a stranger will come across it and wonder, just who the hell that crazy bastard was.