Base fare: £7.99!

Easyjet has a big seat sale on for flights before March 27, and they finally posted their Summer 2004 schedule.

Maddy on Attie Gail’s phone.

Seems the kiddies are showing a fascination with technology pretty early these days… Maddy is 2 years old and is already flipping open that mobile phone and calling her pals! In case you think Attie Gail is fearless when it comes to letting Maddy handle electronics, this is my old handset — I got another one the other day… but I’m still transferring phone numbers from one to the other, so carrying both around for now.

Does that mean Richard Gere’s coming to town again?

I got this in my SFU inbox:

Educating the Heart; Educating the Mind
Tuesday, April 20, 12:30-5:15 pm

His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu will be at the Wosk Centre for Dialogue, to participate in a roundtable dialogue on Combining Educating the Heart with Educating the Mind. Other invited guests include Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Vaclav Havel, former president of the Czech Republic, and Jo-ann Archibald, Canada. Michael Ingham, bishop of the Anglican Diocese of New Westminster will chair the discussion.

This dialogue will be simulcast to SFU’s Harbour Centre campus (Terasen cinema), 515 West Hastings Street, and to the Chan Center at UBC and possibly other locations. The simulcasts are free and open to the public. Seating is limited and reservations are required for the SFU Harbour Centre location. Please call 604.291.5100 or cs_hc@sfu.ca to reserve your seat.

For further information on the Dalai Lama’s visit to Vancouver:

http://www.dalailamavancouver.org/

Hmmm… I just had another look at the date. I’ll be flying to Barcelona that day… so much for seeing the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu for the first time in my life…

I got this map from RamonStoppelenburg’s site. It’s one of the projects from this site (check out the other projects), and it plots the countries you’ve visited in red. It’s rather (unintentionally) misleading because it colours the entire country, even if you’ve only been to a little corner of it, plus it marks all the territories, too. Looking at the map, I don’t feel like I’ve travelled much, really. 19 countries is only 8%. There’s still an awful lot of green there, but this map will have a bit more red on it by May, anyway.

[EDIT Jan '05: The link got broken, so this map includes Spain, which wasn't on the original map because I didn't travel there until April. There's a conspicuous gap where Portugal lies, so maybe I should go there this year!]

[EDIT Aug '08: broken map link]

create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands

It’s true what IR Dingo commented on an earlier post, though, about the Brits being charged up the bum for everything, even though they have all those cut-rate airline deals at their disposal.

Here’s an example: the bridesmaid dresses. What Lucy has gone through to get these dresses in the first place… well, I won’t even go there. Personally, I think the costs involved in throwing a wedding seem like such a SCAM by the wedding industry… but anyway…

Anyway, once Lucy did arrive at a decision that pleased both her sisters (*I’m not going to complain that the dress is in fact the one colour that I dislike — pink — and it’s a style that is harshly alien to my current wardrobe*), they are forcing her to bend to their ridiculous ideas of customer service. Is it just me, or is a 3-month waiting period for 3 dresses a bit much?? Plus, they are charging her an absolute fortune for alteration, e.g. £12 per seam!! I mean, what for heaven’s sake is that?? I’m sure when the dressmaker’s noticed the choice of a two-piece dress, they went cha-ching!

So, what I have suggested is that Lucy courier the dress to me when it arrives — at the end of February! — and I will get it altered here at a fraction of the price, and I won’t have to muck around at the dressmaker’s TWICE when I’m there. I can think of plenty of things I’d rather be doing than standing idly in a bridesmaid dress, like sitting in the sun on a Spanish beach!

I found a deal on Ryanair to fly to Barcelona from Birmingham for a base fare of 4.99 GPB!! It’s a good thing I waited until today to ring Lucy, because I was prepared to book it two days ago, when it was 19.99 GPB!!

I’m not a gambler, but I get a kick out of online auction-type sites like Priceline.com (I’ve found incredible deals on hotels this way, like a suite in San Diego for 40 USD). I also love surfing the web-based cut-price airline sites like Ryanair.com and Easyjet.com for deals. I flew from Zurich to London last year for 20 CHF (about the same in Canadian dollars) on Easyjet, and I think the flight from Liverpool to Geneva the year before was even less! Sure wish we had that here, but we just don’t have a big enough market. There are 55 million people in Britain, an island not that much bigger than Vancouver Island, and we’ve got around 30 million people for this expansive piece of land…

winter wonderland

This is what it looked like when it stopped snowing. My building managers have kept the Christmas lights on, so it looked like a fairyland down in the garden.

Meanwhile, it has been raining since Tuesday night, so the snow — at least downtown — disappeared within 24 hours.

I posted something on Prince and Jehovah’s Witnesses back at the end of October and I got this comment in December, a couple of days before Christmas. Hmmm… are they now proselytizing on the web by using Google searches these days?? Certainly a lot easier than door-to-door, and the most anyone can do is delete comments.

This is so unusual I had to take a photo of Beach Avenue. It’s chaos in the Lower Mainland today.

It’s times like this I am ever so glad that I work from home. No bundling up! No commuting!

People are stranded all over the place, though. It’s chaos because hardly anyone has snow tires, and even if they do, unless they just moved here from some other part of the country, they don’t know how to drive in snow. Vancouver has probably next to no budget for snowplowing, and by the time the snowplows do arrive, you have an unholy mess of cars and buses and other vehicles thrown together like Lego pieces.

Booked a flight today to London on Airmiles.

My best friend, Lucy, is getting married on May 1 in Wolverhampton, near Birmingham in the West Midlands. What I need to do upon arrival in London is make my way north, get my bridesmaid dress fitted first (I’d better start hitting the gym asap), then head off to Barcelona and meander down the Spanish coast. Haven’t decided yet how far to go — Alicante? Malaga? I think Faro (Portugal) would really be pushing it… I have to be back in plenty of time for the wedding. John’s big family from Northern Ireland fly in on Friday the 30th , so I’d like to pre-empt the mayhem.

After the wedding the plan is France for about 5 days, maybe a couple of days in Paris, then take the TGV to visit my friend Nolwenn and her husband Gilles and their new baby Chanelle near Vannes in Britanny, then fly back to London from either Brest or Dinard. Brittany looks beautiful and Brest and Dinard are both coastal towns. Coastal Spain then Coastal France sounds good to me, especially with a big English-Irish wedding in between!


So here’s what it looks like thus far:

Apr 18 - Vancouver -> London
Apr 19 - London -> Wolverhampton
Apr 21 - Birmingham -> Barcelona
Apr 21-28 (Barcelona, then to Malaga? Alicante? Murcia?) Spain
Apr 28/29 - Spain -> Birmingham

*wedding Saturday, May 1*

May 2 - Liverpool -> Paris
May 5??? Paris -> TGV -> Vannes??
May 6??? Vannes -> Brest? Dinard?
May 7 - Dinard? Brest? -> London
May 8 - London -> Vancouver

I tried SO many different options I was beginning to despair:

- open-jaw Vancouver-Barcelona-Birmingham
- open-jaw Vancouver-Birmingham-Barcelona
- Vancouver-Birmingham
- Vancouver-Toronto-London-Cardiff! (it was as close as I could get to Wolverhampton!)
- Vancouver-Ottawa-London…
- crazy routings with American airlines such as NorthWest that forced me to go through San Francisco and New York before even leaving the continent!

It was pretty crazy. What it comes down to is that the airlines that are available through Airmiles out of Vancouver are showing almost no regional flights, mostly hub cities like Amsterdam (on KLM) and London (on Air Canada) so it’s not so bad getting to London, it’s how to get to Wolverhampton. The outbound flight was particularly nutty, as I could not get a single non-stop flight on any of the airlines to depart on April 17, I was getting sent all over the map. The best I could do, because I have an exam on Friday from 7:00-10:00 in the evening, is to leave on a red-eye flight from Vancouver to Toronto, then connect to London. This isn’t so bad, because I leave at nearly midnight on April 17, and get some sleep time before Toronto, to make the connection to London and get in after 9pm. I don’t really lose that much time, with the connection, only a few hours total. I’m just happy I was able to get the last seat on a non-stop London-Vancouver flight.