Airports almost empty day before Thanksgiving | Venture Chronicles:

Case in point, we are talking about taking a family vacation to San Diego early next year (look out Kedrosky!) and decided that renting a minivan and driving down would be cheaper than flying and less hassle to boot. It’s a lot of time behind the wheel but no worse than trudging through an airport pissed off about having to pay $150 to check bags.

Whenever Laurie and I do our driving vacations — which we’ve done since before they made airports so damn painful — friends and co-workers have always wondered if we were insane. Now that airports have become so insane, people are starting to realize that plopping on a plane isn’t the only option, and in many cases, not the best.

We almost always drive vacations (and we never, ever fly to SoCal) for a few reasons: first, we tend to carry a lot of gear, including the computer stuff and cameras and etc. So under most circumstances, flying generates compromises we can avoid by driving. Second, driving is almost invariably cheaper. Third, in many cases, especially these days of three hour waits for connections and flight delays, TSA delays, baggage delays and rental car delays, it’s not significantly slower to drive. And finally, not only does it give us a chance to just sit and talk and be with each other, there’s a whole bunch of stuff between here and there worth seeing and looking at you won’t see at 30,000 feet. The journey CAN be the reward; hell, sometimes the destination is the excuse, not the reason.

When we did our Yellowstone trip this fall, I kept notes on costs and timing. Yellowstone is about the limit of what I’d consider reasonable for a “normal” vacation. Two days driving each way, with rational driving times each way. Silicon Valley is about 16 hours driving from Silicon valley; I prefer to keep each leg about 8-10 hours. That takes you through a lot of territory, though: from silicon valley, it’ll get you to Vancouver, Yellowstone, Salt Lake, Denver, Taos, and all points east. By limiting driving to 8-10 hours, you don’t have to play the “crack of dawn” patrol, you can stop and explore places of interest, eat without a drive-through window, and get into a hotel at a rational hour for a rational sleep. You’re not stressed or harried or exhausted when you get there.

(hint: it’s even MORE interesting to find spots along the way and make the entire journey part of the trip, but we wanted to maximize our time in the park, so we hustled out way each way; I did, however, flag four or five places as future photography locales… But for us, a typical trip to Victoria or Vancouver would involve a day or two in Portland and a couple of stops up and down the Oregon Coast, rather than putting all of our time into one place. Once you get into this “along the way” type of travel, lots of things open up, especially areas you’d have real issues getting to via an airport…)

Here’s a comparison of what it’d take to drive to Yellowstone, versus flying. In many ways, this is the extreme case: Yellowstone is about as far as I’d want to drive on a ten day trip (week off plus two weekends), so you’re spending the maximum amount of time in the car, which you’d think would benefit the airplane. Not necessarily.

For the driving, we left Saturday mid-morning, and arrived in Yellowstone around dinner time on Sunday, stopping overnight in Winnemucca, roughly half way. At the time, gas was headed down but we still paid an average right around $3.70 a gallon. The drive to Yellowstone is almost exactly 1,000 miles.

We drove 1,000 miles getting there, 1,000 miles around the park in the days there, and 1,000 miles coming back, spending a total of $400 for 107 gallons of gas. 2/3 of that gas was used in transit, so the fuel cost for travelling was around $250. Factor in car maintenance to be fair: $70 for the 3,000 mile lube, and some percentage of the 60,000 mile service and tire costs; practically speaking, that’s probably another $70, and I’m probably being generous (my last major service plus 2 new tires ran a grand. factor that cost into 30,000 miles, and you get about $70 for 2,000 miles).

So, the total cost of driving to and from Yellowstone is about $400.

Flying? I did some checks on flight costs at the same time we travelled. For Yellowstone, that’s either West Yellowstone or Bozeman. A typical flight to Bozeman at the same time would have cost you about $500 per person round trip and take 8 hours, flying through Denver or Salt Lake. I just checked, and today it’s about $400ish in December, but next June, we’re back at $450-$500 for a time when a rational person would take that trip. West Yellowstone is slower and more expensive, with only a couple of flights (totalling 90 seats) a day, and it’s seasonal. Then add in a rental car, which when I checked in September was averaging $130/week out of those cities.

So your travel costs end up running you at best about $1,000-$1,100. And if you fly to Yellowstone, you’ll arrive just in time for dinner Saturday — in Bozeman. It’s late enough you won’t actually get into the park until Sunday morning. Leaving? you either get the crack of dawn patrol for a flight out around 7AM, or a late flight out and get home at midnight on Sunday.

Net result? If you fly, you get a Sunday in the park coming in, and a Saturday in the park going out that you don’t get driving. And for the privilege, your cost goes from about $400 to $1,100, over 2X. I’m not counting hotel or food costs here because the same meals get eaten (only in different places) and hotel rooms get used — although most likely, the room on the road while driving will likely be cheaper (ours were about half the cost or more).

As to the hassle factor of driving? you can’t tell me that the joys of the TSA, of flight delays, of 3 hour connecting flight waits, of checking and retrieving luggage and renting cars — and airport food — is any great shakes. It’s all in the attitude; getting into the mindset that the trip is part of the journey and not just a way to the destination opens up many options. And, well, having time to unplug and just talk to the people you’re with? Or heading off a side road and exploring? (well, laurie calls it “getting lost again”, but I prefer to see it as adventuring into the unknown). Massive fun.

Flying options options; I wouldn’t want to drive to chicago or tampa, not unless it was part of a longer, extended trip. OTOH, a two day drive from where you live opens up many places — from silicon valley, pretty much everything west of and into the rockies.

And if you stop and think about it a bit, there is basically no way you can do an airport run from northern california to southern california faster than driving these days, not once you factor in the time getting to and from airports, TSA lines, renting cars, etc. etc. At best, it’s a wash. and driving’s much cheaper. I can’t see why anyone flies back and forth on that shuttle, honestly.

so for me, it’s car first. We’ve done flying trips to Vancouver and Victoria in the past (flying into Victoria directly, into Vancouver, and into Seattle and crossing the border), and you know what? Have fun in the plane (hah). I’ll just hop in the car. You may get there a bit sooner, but I’ll be relaxed and happy when I get there, and I’ll have all of my stuff. What did you decide not to bring to fit into the overhead and checkin restrictions, anyway?

What I don’t understand is why when airlines decided on what business model they were going to follow, they chose “greyhound bus” as what they wanted to be when they grew up….

Update: One of the commenters made an important comment:

It’s hard to argue with most of what you wrote, but flying does allow me to take do a trip like a 4-day weekend in Vancouver from time to time.

And that’s an important thing to keep in mind: the trade-off between time and money. If your time is short, then spending money to minimize travel time, but when you do, it’s knowing that you’re taking a more expensive option for speed. That’s fine; I certainly wouldn’t drive a 4-5 day trip to Vancouver.

Ditto a day trip to SoCal; if I had to go to SoCal and return same day for a meeting (first, I’d try NOT to, but that’s a different issue), then I might fly, because otherwise it’d be a really long day; in that case, sitting in a plane or airport might be preferable to driving. But if I could schedule it to drive down, take in the meeting, overnight, and drive back while stopping at, say, Morro Beach on a Saturday, well, sign me up…

So ultimately, NONE of this is absolute. And if your idea of a perfect vacation is to sit on a beach in Cancun drinking margaritas — that’s great, too. But heck, you could sit on a beach near San Diego and drink for a lot less, I bet, and have pretty darn good weather, too. Or Phoenix, for that matter.

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October 20th, 2008 by chuq

What is Yellowstone?

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I’ve finally finished up processing my photos from the Yellowstone trip. In about a week in the park, I took a bit over 1,500 images, which I’ve ended up “keeping” about 100. All in all, I’m pretty happy with the results, although one of the things I wanted to do was work on shooting some fall color, and while I found some nice opportunities for that down in the Tetons, I was generally unhappy with the results. I’ll have the last of the photos up on flickr today, and then I can work on writing things up and starting on the next projects..

I’ve been trying to come up with a single photograph that to me sums up what Yellowstone is — and I find I can’t. Yellowstone is really three things, each independent and yet all of them intertwined. The first is the thermal areas: geysers, springs, paint pots. Sometimes take-your-breath-away beautiful, sometimes starkly unearthly, sometimes just raw power unleashed:

Without these thermal features, Yellowstone wouldn’t exist, on a number of levels — the supervolcano that underlies Yellowstone carved not only created the land the park sits on, but over millions of years carved out the mountains to the west of the park which funnels in the weather and the rain and snow, giving the area the water needed to fuel the thermal features in the first place.

Beyond that, before our society really understood the need to protect areas like this, if it hadn’t been for the thermal areas, this land simply wouldn’t have been protected. It would have been just another set of ranches and cattle pastures.

By creating the park, however, they created a place where the wildlife can survive and (mostly) prosper. And the wildlife is a huge part of Yellowstone, as you could tell by the traffic jams that happened along the roads any time something larger than a squirrel appeared (and we happily joined in on those…). Elk and Bison were everywhere, and usually in the way; Laurie and I saw coyotes twice, beavers, two bears (one black in the far distance, and our young grizzly near Fishing bridge), and a flock of mountain goats systematically raising havoc around Tower — we saw them one day using the roadway as a travel path, and a second day eating a traffic pullout (to the consternation of rangers). The major “misses” for us in wildlife were moose and wolves, and the wolves were active up near Mammoth but we didn’t hear about it until later….

But to me, after hiking around the various geyser basins and spending mornings and evening’s up in Hayden Valley looking for critters, what kept drawing me back was the landscape. And I knew as soon as I took this shot that it was going to be MY shot of Yellowstone.

And so it is. If there’s a single image from the trip that I’d have to pick out of all of them, I’d say it’s this one. It’s going up on my wall soon…

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October 6th, 2008 by chuq

Musings From Yellowstone National Park | National Parks Traveler

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Laurie and I did a week in Yellowstone — which is obvious if you’ve seen what’s being posted to Flickr.

One little amusement was that I read this piece in the hotel room in West Yellowstone, before we moved into grant’s village for a few days and completely off the net. It really echoed what we saw in many ways.

Musings From Yellowstone National Park | National Parks Traveler:

Despite all the issues that constantly swirl around the National Park System — funding constraints, staffing woes, rising fees — there’s still more to be proud about than disappointed.

For instance, after 136 years you can still find more than enough room in Yellowstone National Park that feels raw, wild, and untrampled by humans. True, the front country can feel over-run, particularly if you’re there in July or August. But during my week-long trip earlier this month the crowds were not suffocating, the bison jams not too plentiful — although, we did wonder about the folks parking partway on and off the road to view a single mule deer — and the insects wonderfully vanquished by the frosty overnights.

Definitely. We had a herd of bison around fishing bridge for a few days that made traffic really interesting, but they finally moved a bit off the road. there was also a small herd of mountain goats that decided that the road was a LOT less work than the back country, and was wandering around the Tower area — we saw them one day just walking up the grand loop, smiling at cars, and the next day, in a pullout attempting to weed it for the rangers. The rangers weren’t amused.

Ditto lone bison, who we saw frequently using the grand loop to get from here to there — slowly — with that “and what the hell are you going to DO about it?” attitude.

More on Yellowstone as I get it written up, but I had to point out this piece:

* Never underestimate a raven. In the parking lot at Norris some travelers in a Toyota Tacoma had left their soft-shell cooler in the bed of their truck. It didn’t take long for a pair of ravens to find it, open it, and settle down to lunch. Even after someone placed a case of water bottles atop the cooler the birds found a way in. Note: Ravens don’t like cold cuts; they pulled out and dropped to the side both ham and turkey.

* Some Americans can be truly baffling. One drove up to us in the Norris parking lot and asked whether there was anything interesting to see.

I kid you not. I read this post, and then the next day, we went exploring Norris Geyser Basin. When we got there, we heard the cawing of a raven, and there it was, sitting on the back of a pickup truck which was full of stuff and covered with a tarp:

we saw and watched it for a good five minutes as it explored the back of the truck. It finally located the cooler, and made a concerted attempt to uncover it, including pulling at the ropes and working on the knots to see if it could get anything loose. Every so often, it’d stop and stare at us watching it as if wondering if we were going to try to stop it (nope, we were too amused). We finally decided it wasn’t going to succeed and went off for our hike around the basis, but as we were leaving, it let out a series of vocalizations, which were answered from another part of the parking lot. As we headed towards the boardwalks, we passed a second raven walking up the parking lot asphalt in the direction of the pickup truck.

Evidently he called in some help.

No, we don’t know if they got in — probably not — because the truck was gone when we got back.

And got help us, this was ALSO true. After our walk through the basis and along the upper edges of Porcelain basin, I huffed my way up to the museum area and was standing there catching my breath (the altititude KICKED MY BUTT, but we’ll talk of that later), someone walked up to another person in the museum and said “hey, is there anything to see here?”

Um, no, not really. but check my photo stream for proof — I’m starting to work through my Norris photos now, although the mountain chickadees were shot at Steamboat Geyser…

It’d been over 15 years since we’d made our first visit to Yellowstone, and damn, was it a wonderful week — but I’m not going back until I lose 100 pounds, because at 8,000 feet and trying to get some serious walking in, it fought back. But it was worth it…

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September 4th, 2008 by chuq

Whatever X, Day IV

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Whatever » Whatever X, Day IV:

Please God, never let me have a book cover whose images would be equally at home airbrushed onto a van.

Have I said recently how much I’ve come to enjoy John Scalzi’s writings?

Oh, dear. it seems I haven’t. Must fix that.

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August 4th, 2008 by chuq

A web comic you should read…

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if you don’t read xkcd, you really should. Well written, funny, sometimes poignant, and one of those that understands that all this tech stuff really doesn’t replace people, much as we sometimes want to convince ourselves.

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June 25th, 2008 by chuq

Recalling Yellowstone National Park’s Historic 1988 Fire Season | National Parks Traveler

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Recalling Yellowstone National Park’s Historic 1988 Fire Season | National Parks Traveler:

No one realized it at the time, but when a lightning strike ignited a single tree in Yellowstone National Park’s Lamar Valley 20 years ago, it was a dire harbinger of what would become a historic fire season in the park.
The resulting fire, baptized the “Rose Fire” in honor of a nearby creek, went out on its own after flickering briefly in June. Though it burned just that one tree, the fire was ominous nonetheless.
You could say that the 1988 fire season in Yellowstone was surprising in that it followed a spring that saw precipitation levels range 150-200 percent above normal. The problem, though, was that when May turned to June the precipitation abruptly left — it was almost as if Mom Nature twisted the garden spigot closed — leaving behind lush vegetation that quickly dried out and would soon serve as incredible kindling when the high, dry heat of summer in the Rocky Mountain West set in.

We visited Yellowstone a few years after the fires and were stunned by the damage. It’s been on our list for a couple of years to get back, but life hasn’t cooperated (yet).
But what struck me reading this is that this explains — almost exactly — what’s going on in California this year. Early wet winter, and then it stopped. And now the fires, which have been scary in their number and intensity. I remember watching the foothills around the bay area go golden, weeks earlier than usual, and thinking to myself “this is not good”.
Unfortunately, I was right. And it looks to me to be something that’ll get worse before it gets better this year.

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March 18th, 2008 by chuq

Arthur C. Clarke, dead at 90.

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And so we lose another one. Sad.

I got to know Clarke a little back when I was involved in SFWA, to the point where we exchanged christmas cards for a while, and a letter or two, and he was an occasional commenter on the zine I was publishing back then. He was one of those pros that was always accessible and friendly and willing to stop and talk to people (and trust me, not all pros are like that). Fascinating writer and interesting person, one of the key writers who got me involved with science fiction as a kid, so getting to know him later on was a real trip.

I don’t think we can under-estimate the impact he’s had on our lives and society. Not necessarily for the things the obit writers are going to talk about — yes, he wrote about things we take for granted today, like geosynchronous communication satellites, but others had those ideas, too. it’s that he inspired a generation of people to actually go out and figure out how to build them and make them happen.

In many ways, Jack Kennedy got us to the moon, but it was Arthur Clarke who got the bodies on the ground who could build the rocket when it was time to build it. There are very few bigger names in the field and in society in general. And now he’s moved on to whatever’s next.

Knowing him, he did it smiling.

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February 21st, 2008 by chuq

Andrew Burt for president of SFWA… (last one out please turn out the lights)

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Before Even More People Send it to Me:

an indication of how electing Burt will not do wonders for SFWA’s relations with the public, or its potential future membership. And here we pause for a sigh and a sad headshake.

I have to admit that if I were still a member of SFWA (which I’m not), I’d be tempted to vote for Burt. Not because Burt is the best candidate (he’s not), or even a good candidate, or even an acceptable one.

I’d consider it because it’s very likely to cause SFWA to fall apart and die, and I long ago came to the conclusion that while the field needs a good writer’s group to support SF/F writers, SFWA ain’t it, and you can’t fix it. So voting for Burt might be the way to cause SFWA to go away, allowing the people within the field with a clue to have a chance to start fresh and maybe build something decent. Unfortunately, it looks like as long as SFWA exists, there’s not enough motivation to create that new organization and get enough people behind it to make it work.

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October 4th, 2007 by chuq

Yosemite Blog » NPS Officials Want to Cut Down Trees so Tourists Can See Better

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Yosemite Blog » NPS Officials Want to Cut Down Trees so Tourists Can See Better:

The National Park Service has released their plan for overhauling the Tunnel View Overlook, one of the most popular tourist destinations in the park, but some of the ideas presented may not be that popular with locals including removing trees so visitors can see better.

This is, of course, silly. This “it has to always be the way I remember it always has been” concept ought to be dead by now. The only true constant in a natural setting is change; in fact, the reason the trees need to be removed is because they’ve grown…

This “don’t touch it” idea is what led to the idea we had to strongly fight forest fires and prevent “damage” — which led to the overgrowth problems and massive fuel loads that today are part of the problem of the massive forest fires we have today. Fortunately, we now better understand the life cycle of a forest, and generally work more compatibly with it.

And I’m old enough to remember when they used to DREDGE Mirror Lake, in the name of “keeping it natural”, and added sluice gates and the like to keep it from silting. Think about that phrase a bit, about having to bring in heavy machinery and doing major reconstruction, all in the name of keeping it as nature intended.

There are bigger issues in Yosemite than a few trees that are blocking the view at a place built to allow people to look at the views.

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September 24th, 2007 by chuq

Acupuncture, real or fake, gets results in study

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Acupuncture, real or fake, gets results in study:

Fake acupuncture works nearly as well as the real thing for low back pain, and either kind performs much better than conventional care, German researchers have found.

Almost half the patients treated with acupuncture needles felt relief that lasted months. In contrast, only about a quarter of the patients receiving medications and other Western medical treatments felt better.

Even fake acupuncture worked better than conventional care, leading researchers to wonder if pain relief came from the body’s reactions to thin needle pricks or, possibly, the placebo effect.

“Acupuncture represents a highly promising and effective treatment option for chronic back pain,”

Hmm. Very, very interesting, that the faux treatment is still more effective than the standard ones. Says a lot about how we treat back problems, no?

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September 19th, 2007 by chuq

Chemical clue sheds light on winter depression – health – 19 September 2007 – New Scientist

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Chemical clue sheds light on winter depression – health – 19 September 2007 – New Scientist:

The researchers studied 73 drug-free patients with seasonal affective disorder (SAD) and 70 people without the condition. People with SAD get depressed in the autumn and winter, and often go into remission in the spring and summer. So-called “bright light therapy” – where sufferers stare at brightly lit screens – can also relieve symptoms.

The researchers were interested in these patients’ serotonin transporter (SERT) – a molecule that “pumps” serotonin back into cells. SERT is expressed in blood platelets, so they drew blood at three points in time: in the autumn or winter (when patients were experiencing seasonal depression), after four weeks of light therapy, and again in summer.

They tested the platelets to see how much SERT was expressed there, and found levels were normal in both groups. They then measured how many times per minute the SERT would go to work removing serotonin, and here they found significant differences.

In blood taken during winter depression, SAD patients had significantly more removal events per minute than those in the healthy control group – about 350 compared with 200.

The process “is too efficient”, says Willeit. After therapy, in people who got better, the number of removal events declined. In those who did not improve, the numbers stayed the same. In summer, SAD patients’ removal events slowed to normal levels.

some interesting data on winter depression and possible causes and cures….

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In some places on this site I use links that take you to a page where you can buy a product I talk about. If you use that link and make a purchase, I'll earn a small commission and you'll earn my thanks for doing so. You don't pay more when you do this and I get a few dollars to help pay for this site's fees or to put away for that 800mm lens I'd love to buy. If you choose to use these affiliate links, thank you. If you would rather not, that's fine as well.

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