On the trip down

The flight attendant on the YUL to PHL called the aircraft a "Canada Air" CL 65. As we taxied along, she walked past my seat whereupon I pointed out that the name was "Canadair" and she should get it right as "the factory was right over there" and gestured vaguely to the left hoping my geography was right.

Now that I reflect on the matter, I hope that she was even more wrong as Canadair is now deeply a part of Bombardier and has been for a while. While I was studying aircraft engineering, Bombardier already had its paws on Canadair. The point of my fear is that the plane might have been old enough to vote or even buy booze in the U.S.!  I might have sat in it when it was being built the weekend Denise F. died.

On further examination of the data, Bombardier refers to the planes as CRJ-200's.

Then again, Bombardier is still building Regional Jets whereas Boeing is no longer building 757s like the one I am currently sitting in. This jet could be older that the "Canada Air".

US Airways/American Airlines makes Air Canada and WestJet look very good. In flight entertainment is an overhead screen showing a movie I have no interest in and there are no power sockets for recharging electronic devices. Then again the age thing might be at work. One of the panels in the lavatory near my seat was held in place with masking tape and it took them nearly two hours of flying time to turn off the seatbelts sign.

The online check-in process for the second flight initially put me in a "B" seat, i.e. a middle seat, neither window or aisle. There didn't seem to be a free (using two senses of the word (no cost and available)) aisle seat for me to pick. Then I began to wonder what the red seats near the front were. They were exit row seats which didn't have an actual cost attached to them but were reserved for people who could meet the physical and mental requirements. The first was being able-bodied. The second was two-fold: you had to be smart enough to operate the door properly and be fairly fluent in English. * As I met these requirements, I leapt at the opportunity to get an aisle seat. As well, it was near the entry door.

The plane loaded in good time and the doors were closed and armed. Then we waited for a time before it was announced that some one hadn't serviced the lavatories and we would have to wait a bit. We ended up taking off nearly an hour late. In theory, clement weather patterns mean the plane should be able to take up for some lost time. However, we will still be late and there is something of a cut-off time for check-in at the hostel. Originally, I had about two hours after arrival. Now, it is a darn sight tighter.

The cheesesteak I found was very tasty, though ultimately an exercise in beef, fat and salt. Unexpected pleasant surprise was the Yards India Pale Ale.

Update: at 8:45 it was announced we will only be about 15 minutes late. Still not impressed.

* On the safety card, there was a full panel devoted to exit row procedures which began with a warning blurb to this effect in English, Spanish and French. The rest of the panel was in English only.

On the American wing of Trudeau Airport

After a "beware of spring break travel" article in the news, I opted to get to the airport with plenty of time to spare. Robin was happy to oblige, so he and Benjy the dog showed up at 10. We drove out, Robin making his now traditional joke about how Benjy would be coming with me.

Security seemed particularly slow, partly because only about three of the dozen or so slots were open. However, the real cause was a family ahead of me who didn't seem to know how to get through security efficiently. The unused lines amplified the sense of delay.

The Americans let me through into the preclearance area with what turned to be about two hours to spare.

Trudeau seems quiet at this hour. The effect though is an illusion as the American wing doesn't have a runway view. It also looks out at the International Wing which sees most of its traffic in late afternoon and evening. The planes in sight have mostly been Canadian- or Brazilian-made regional jets. This meant that when I saw a larger Air Canada jet being towed in, I took it for a twin aisle plane rather than the little Airbus 319 it was.

My plane to Philly will be a Bombardier Regional Jet made right here at the airport or at least assembled as the parts are made all over the World.

I am feeling much calmer now.

On a near miss

My cousin Kristine posted on Facebook that she and her family were taking a cruise to the Virigin Islands this week.  Out of curiousity, I looked up where those islands were and was surprised to see they are the next islands to the East of Puerto Rico.  I inquired of her if her ship was going to stop in San Juan on Friday.  Alas, it stopped in San Juan today (Wednesday)!  It would have been so much fun to see them in such an outré location!  To my knowledge, this is the only time the two of us have been or are going to Puerto Rico and we miss each other by less than 48 hours!

On planning how to spend time in Philadelphia airport

To my vast lack of surprise, there are no direct flights between Montreal and Puerto Rico.  As far as I know, the only direct flight from anywhere in Canada to Puerto Rico is a weekly Air Canada flight out of Toronto. The flight is timed so as to be able to go out and back in one day. This means that it leaves early in the morning and gets back late. Aside from the inherent fact that six days is too short a time to do what I want to do, the timing of the flight means I would have to spend one or two nights in Toronto in order to catch the flight.  This very quickly led me opt for an American airline.

The choice of airline involved a surprising amount of fiddling around with various American airline websites.  The experience involved some rather baroque itineraries being proposed by their computer algorithms.  One was flying from Montreal to Miami, then changing planes and flying to Philadelphia, changing planes again, then flying to Puerto Rico.  That wasn't even the worst proposal! One airline wanted me to go through Dallas. Another one went through Chicago O'Hare which I am reliably informed is an airport worth avoiding at all cost.  As well, my sources tell me that if possible, when travelling with a bike, it is best to fly with as few airlines as possible. Ideally only one.  This was actually a bit of a benefit as it meant I was spared having decide whether to use a website travel agent like Expedia (which I am of two minds about) or book directly through an airline website (which I prefer to do).  One thing I found frustrating about Expedia was that while there is a "direct flight only" filter option, it isn't useful when there aren't any direct flights!  While I accept this, I would rather not have to scroll past "multiple change" flight options in order to find the "one change only" flights.

I eventually settled on US Airways. Strangely enough, it is the only American airline I have flown on. It used to be called USAir.  It featured in the Montreal to Miami leg of my trip to Bolivia back in 1992.  (Lloyd Aero Boliviana (a.k.a. LAB, a.k.a. Llamas Are Better) didn't fly to Canada and Air Canada didn't fly to Bolivia.)  It won't be around for much longer as it is in the process of merging with American Airlines.  The resultant airline will be called "American Airlines."

Anyway, my flights involve changes of planes in Philadelphia. On the way down, I have a three-hour pause which should be enough for Leonardo to change planes.  I idly wondered what I might do in that time. I came up with the notion of partaking of one of Philadelphia's culinary delicacies, viz the Cheesesteak. At lunch time at work, I decided to look up where one might acquire one in Philadelphia airport.  A quick Google search revealed that I was far from the first person asking that question!  What a time to be alive!

On plans afoot

After much internal debate, I have decided to go to Puerto Rico for my winter vacation. Naturally, I will be bringing Leonardo.  The basic idea is to ride around the island including a visit to the Arecibo Observatory.  Some snorkeling is also in the plans. While I had considered to trip to see Izzy in England, various factors dissuaded me from doing so, including the fact that -20 C weather has been very common during the last two months here.

I wrote a bit about this trip a while back, but I will elaborate further. The genesis of this trip started in November 2012, the day after Obama was re-elected. On that day, I read that the Puerto Ricans had voted to become a state, though the vote was non-binding. This caught my attention as there hasn't been a new American state in my lifetime. As well, the fact that Puerto Rico is largely Spanish-speaking made for an unusual potential addition to the American political landscape. Since then, I have been keeping a weather eye on Puerto Rico and have been pondering the notion of a trip. Rather depressingly, one source I read suggested that Puerto Rico would likely end up being a state dominated by the Democrats, partly because of the Republicans' notoriously anti-Latin American stance. As the Republicans dominate Congress these days, it seems that the Puerto Ricans will have an uphill battle to gain statehood.

This will be the first time I have been to the Caribbean so it should be interesting. I am a little nervous, but then I always am. On Sunday, I took Leonardo out of the box I had shipped him in from Kelowna and replaced his suspect rear tire with a new one.  I then gave the chain a cleaning before putting him into another bike box, this one larger and reinforced with corroplast.  I had used the box before. However, I was surprised to see that it still had wheels attached to it from my previous trip with it in 2013.

On American financial primitivism

This post should have been written months ago, but I never quite got around to it.  It stems from various observations I made whilst biking in the United States last year concerning the American financial system and how different it is compared to the Canadian system and indeed that of other industrialized countries.

The first thing that struck me was how deeply and quickly the elimination of the penny in Canada has shaped my habits. Several times, I found myself instinctively rounding down or up to the nearest 5 cents when paying for things with cash, despite the fact the Canadian penny hasn't been gone for all that long. Pennies are surprisingly annoying once you have to use them again. While I was waiting out a rain shower under the eves of the C-store in Caspian, I overheard the cashier talking on her mobile to someone asking if they could get her some pennies as she was out and it was a weekend. I surprised her by giving her my stock of pennies (about 17 or so) on the random acts of kindness principle. A few days later at another, less corporate C-store on Highway 2 in Michigan, the owner told me that he rounded down prices to the nearest 5 cents. We had a discussion on the Canadian experience of the abolition of pennies.

In a similar fashion, I noticed that I was instinctively rustling my American bills in order to separate them as I do when handling the new plastic Canadian bills which are known to be somewhat sticky. The cloth paper American greenbacks seem almost an archaic throwback along with the absence of dollar coins or even two dollar bills. While both exist, they are rarely seen. The two dollar bill on account of prejudice bordering on superstition against them.

Another throwback is the way credit cards are handled. Rather than the now ubiquitous PIN reading machine (at least in Canada but also in the U.K. and Australia) such as the two transactions I did this morning, the procedure is the old carbon copy imprint and signature method. Likewise, Interac or other debit payment systems seem to be almost unknown. One visible effect of this is that it is obvious that people still pay for a lot of things by check, including gas. I saw a number of gas stations with signs limiting the use of checks such as this one:

I see this as a sign people aren't using credit or debit cards to commonly pay for things. As well, it also indicates a fear of fraud.

In thinking about these issues and trying to figure out the "why" of it, I tied it in with another phenomena that seemed odd to my eyes: the absence of major banking chains. When I rode through American towns, I rarely saw any familiar banks. By this I don't mean Toronto Dominion or Bank of Montreal, but a consistent  "big name" bank, à la Citicorp, Bank of America or the like. Instead, the banks I saw tended to be "First National Bank of Podunk" or "Mudville Savings and Loans." Evidently, they were linked to a greater network as their ATMs worked for me, but they didn't seem to part of a chain equivalent to TD or even Caisse Populaire Desjardins.  My working theory is that there is a bias against "them there evil Wall Street bankers" which translates into small banks. (I have since found out that interstate bank branching only became legal in 1994(!)) How the small banks tie in to the larger financial network is unknown to me.  However, I am prepared to speculate that this means the small banks don't have the capital to bring in the debit machines. From a grocer friend, I know that those things are expensive and would be more so if the parent bank was small. Thus these small banks represent a barrier to technological innovation. At least, that is my theory.

As well, I can't help but wonder if the separation of small banks dealing with consumers from the large commercial banks didn't contribute to the financial meltdown a few years back as financial instruments (such as sub prime loans) "traveled" more between institutions rather than staying put within a single large bank with many branches.

All this to say that financially, the United States seems primitive in many respects.

On finding out something rather after the fact

My readers may or may not remember that I biked out of Birmingham back in 2010. While it was comparatively tricky, at the time, I thought the lad in Great Whitley was overly impressed at my feat.  I was reading about the kerfuffle about some hack at Fox News labelling Birmingham a Muslim-only city when I noticed that the BBC was describing the city as Britain's second largest city.  This took me by surprise as I would have said that honour would likely be Glasgow or Manchester before Birmingham had someone asked me.

Thankfully, no one did.  (I have a reputation for being knowledgeable that I would like to keep up.)

However, it is a bit embarrassing that I had no idea just how big Birmingham is until so long the exploit. Then again, if I had known, I might not have tried! It is worth noting that on my 2013 trip, I avoided Birmingham by getting off the train in Wolverhampton.