Posts Tagged ‘travel’

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Continental Sucks

by Derek on August 29th, 2011
Continental Sucks

Sorry for the day late comic, I didn’t get home from PAX until the afternoon and spent most of the day settling back in and resting after the long ordeal it was to get back home.

Sunday morning of PAX I checked our flight status and saw that it had been canceled. We decided to just continue our PAX as planned and worry about the logistics of getting home until later. About halfway through the day I realized it’d probably be better to reschedule sooner rather than later.

I called Priceline and they said that I had to call Delta since my return flight was with them. I talked to a representative of Delta and they said that the earliest flight to NYC they could get me was THURSDAY MORNING. I called Priceline again to see if there was anything they could do, but they said actually I needed to call Continental since the first part of my reservation was with them and they owned the itinerary or something.

Then I called Continental and their automated message in essence said what my comic says, and they disconnected me. So then I called Priceline again to see if they could do anything, but the soonest flight they could find was Tuesday for $1600 EACH!

So after that I just searched for tickets on delta.com and by some miracle there was a 1:00 AM flight back to NYC and the price was totally reasonable. I couldn’t believe it but I bought it any way. I scarcely believed that we had the tickets until I was checked in at the airport. Turns out our flight had to leave at 3:45 AM because JFK wasn’t letting planes in until around 12:00 PM.

LUCKY!!!

Oh and Jonathan Coulton was on our flight.

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The Darker Side Of Visiting Home

by Derek on December 30th, 2010
The Darker Side Of Visiting Home

It used to be that when I went home to Boston it was to my parents’ house where they had a really bad internet connection to the point that I turned off images on the browser. Now I visit my sister’s place and they have fine internet there, but the last time I visited they had recently acquired a new HDTV but yet to have any HD devices. Not really a huge deal, but it does feel kind of sad not seeing technology get used to its potential. It’s been a year or so since I’ve gone back so things may have changed since then.

EDIT: Turned out they had since purchased a Playstation 3. The good thing about when people you know get a blu-ray player is that suddenly the slate of movies that can be gifted has been entirely swept clean.

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Long Trip Home

by Derek on December 29th, 2010
Long Trip Home

Hopefully by the time you read this we made it to Boston without any incident. We really dodged the bullet on this weather. We were going back and forth a bit for when we were going to Boston and settled on Tuesday. Good thing too, because the Bolt Buses for Monday were call canceled because of the weather. Hopefully the driver drove safe and it didn’t take an absurdly long amount of time to get there.

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Post Vacation Shut In

by Derek on November 19th, 2010
Post Vacation Shut In

Actually we haven’t eaten any of our delicious instant ramen since we got back. We still haven’t gone to hip and trendy Ippudo (we considered going to the location in Japan) but we did have their brand of instant ramen while we were in Japan which was very good. Ramen aside, I will confess that I have a bag of Hershey’s nuggets sitting on my desk and a bag of kisses in the kitchen. Oh yeah, and there are some Smarties that Anna bought to make her Costume Quest bento. We’ll get back into the cooking groove at some point. Anna made tarako spaghetti yesterday and tomorrow we’re going to Minca since we’ve been dying to go there since we got back to NYC. I should take a shower now.

Blog posts for our trip are starting to trickle out! There’re sooooo many photos to go through, plus I’m doing my best to add silly captions for as many photos as possible. During the entire trip I was thinking up the things I wanted to say about each photo. Check out the links below!

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Beating Jet Lag Pt 2

by Derek on November 17th, 2010
Beating Jet Lag Pt 2

As I write this it’s 3:23 AM Wednesday morning and I feel fully awake. Granted I took a nap late afternoon, but yeah I’ll probably be real tired late afternoon again tomorrow. It’s okay though because I’m getting a lot of photoshop work on my trip photos done. The bad thing is that I don’t get channel 11 in our living room and Star Trek: TNG plays at 3 AM.

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Beating Jet Lag

by Derek on November 16th, 2010
Beating Jet Lag

When we got to Japan it was during the evening and we ended up staying up late into the night eating and drinking with friends. This meant that we didn’t wake up at any weird hours, but for the next few days I was crashing hard at 8pm for which I blame jet lag and also very long days of a lot of walking and just doing a whole lot of stuff.

We got back to NYC yesterday around 2 pm and I went to sleep around 10:00. Though as I was watching House I nodded off a few times to the point that I realized as soon as my head hit the pillow I would instantly lose consciousness. Lots of photos to go through and lots of blogging to do. I’ll be sure to get some posted soon!

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Japan Trip 2010

by Derek on November 1st, 2010
Japan Trip 2010

Follow my Twitter here!

We’ve been planning this trip for a while and it’s finally come! I haven’t been to Japan since I was 13, coincidentally the exchange rate was just as bad back then as it is right now T_T I saw a lot of shrines and cultural things back then so this time I won’t feel bad if I don’t see as much of that kind of stuff.

The star attraction though is Mei and the Kittenbus!!! For those of you not in the know, it’s the short film sequel to Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro which plays ONLY at the Ghibli Museum in Japan. There’s no other way in the world to watch this film. The museum runs on a rotating schedule where they swap out the film every few months so we had to plan our trip around seeing this. Other Miyazaki related things we have planned are eating THESE! The other big part of our trip is going to Yakushima island which is the rainforesty place in Japan that inspired the landscapes of Nausicaa and forest of Princess Mononoke.

We’re also planning on seeing the giant Gundam and doing a whole mess of other geeky things. Not to mention the FOOD we’re planning on eating (drooooooool).

I’ll do my best to write about it on my blog, but follow my Twitter for all updates! When I get back from the trip I’ll incorporate the photos I take into my comic so that I don’t have a big gaping hole in my comic archives.

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Airport Security Fluids

by Derek on September 3rd, 2010
Airport Security Fluids

Actually I might’ve mentioned doing this in an previous comic, but oh well.

By the time you read this I’ll be in Seattle attending PAX Prime! Anna and I had so much fun at PAX East that we decided to go to the main event in Seattle. There’re going to be a lot of new games there which were displayed at E3. I’m hoping to get my hands on a bunch of stuff like Dead Space 2, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, Dance Central and I’m hoping they’ll have the Nintendo 3DS there. I’ve already had a friend request of a video of me playing Dance Central in the Kinect booth.

I’ve already marked up a schedule with what panels I want to attend. Some very generous soul made an Android app for Pax which is pretty awesome. Last PAX Anna was the only one of us with a smartphone, but this time we’re both geared up and ready to go!

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American Money

by Derek on June 28th, 2010
American Money

I wanted to do this comic sooner after my trip to Canada, but it got away from me.

I’m sure lots of Americans have wondered what happens when Canadians receive American money. From a very unscientific study (googling and trusting the first bit of information I found) American coins are treated just like normal money and people don’t bat an eye when they receive it in Canada, at least in the cities close to the border. Hopefully there’s a Canadian reader who can provide some comments on this. The same page I found also said that you can’t really exchange it for profit.

The real question is, do vending machines in Canada discriminate between American and Canadian quarters? I would imagine that would be the one sticking point.

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Customs Declaration

by Derek on June 3rd, 2010
Customs Declaration

When we went to Canada for a convention this past weekend we thought it was a good opportunity to get rid of the various nuts we had in our kitchen which would probably sit around until they weren’t good. Also we had some beef jerky from the Mononoke Ghibli Feast and bought a new thing of cashews at the supermarket. Then I saw this section of the customs declaration form:
—————

Meat/meat products; dairy products; fruits;

vegetables; seeds; nuts; plants and animals or their

parts/products; cut flowers; soil; wood/woodproducts; birds; insects.
—————
I always knew about the fruits and vegetables and animals but this one had more on it than I ever remember seeing. Us being the paranoid law abiding citizens that we are we ate as much of our snacks as we could and tossed them before going through customs. Of course, after going through customs we realized they weren’t going to search us so we could’ve got through with all our snacks with no problem at all. *facepalm*

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