Here’s the ideal solution for those couples that always seem to flit past each other in the whirlwind of a busy life. Get married at the airport.
In a promotion organised by innovative British airline easyjet, Czech couple Miloslava Vopelkova and Robert Hruska won a wedding at Prague’s Ruzyne airport. I’ve spent a few hours at Ruzyne, and while it’s more spacious and modern than a few other international gateways I could name, (bonjour Paris-CDG and howdy LAX), it’s certainly not where I’d choose to spend one of the biggest days of my life.
Still, the bride and groom look very happy, and can now look forward to an all expenses paid honeymoon around Europe.
I’ve just got two questions. Did they have the wedding reception at the excellent Pilsner Urquell pub that’s part of the airport, and who’s going to pay their massive airport parking bill after once return from tripping around the Continent?
Saturday morning I saw a travel/human interest story with a Route 66 connection on TV. The mention of Route 66 was the first thing that pulled me away from buttering my English muffin from the complimentary breakfast bar at the Fairfield Inn in Owenboro, Kentucky. (I was there for a wedding.) I became more enamored about the Route 66 story when I heard about the 66-foot soda bottle outside this new tourist stop.
“Pops” just opened on this historic highway thus adding a destination draw to Arcadia, Oklahoma. (It’s just south of Oklahoma City.)This gas station, restaurant, giftshop, roadside attraction combo peddles 400 different kinds of sodas for the thirsty traveler. There are 43 kinds of root beer and 50 kinds of cream soda, for example. I can’t imagine you couldn’t find something to satisfy.
You can’t miss the building since the sculpture soda bottle towers above the horizon. The way it beams out into the night in this photo from Pops’s Web site reminds me of a scene from the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Head to the Web site for some soda fizzing sounds and videos. Very slick. This is a well thought out venture.
Here’s one video documentary I found posted on the Web site Route 66 News. It gives a bit of Route 66 history besides the making of Pops.
This comes to us from a friend who runs one of my favorite sites on the Web: Newyorkology. Amy Langfield sent us a link to a video as soothing as it is bizarre.
The shots here, slow-mo and grainy, but oddly compelling, were made in Bangkok Suvarnabhumi International Airport in Thailand at 4 am. I’m sure the new-agey music has something to do with it, but I had a hard time pulling my eyes away from this.
Our good friend Rolf Potts, author of Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel, was recently invited to speak at Google’s New York office as a part of the Authors@Google program. Fortunately for us non-Google employees (or is it open to the public? I can’t tell), each talk is filmed and posted to YouTube. What you have above this paragraph is nearly an hour’s worth of Rolf talking about his book and sharing various experiences on the road. He then fields questions from the audience. Here’s a few of those questions:
When your traveling in case you get hurt? What kind of documents do you carry with you?
What are attitudes have you experienced when you travel as an American post-9/11?
Is it possible to not be a tourist? How do you get off the tourist’s trail?
How do you deal with coming home after a long trip?
Here’s a video of from rcrcmt on YouTube posted a few days ago that shows what the fires we saw along I-90 looked like and includes commentary and firefighting action. This is what is changing travel plans in many parts of Montana.
Yesterday, our last full day in Montana, we were supposed to be at Holland Lake. The car was packed and we were ready to head out from Philipsburg, but a phone call came from a friend who we were to meet there. She said not to go. Because of the fires, the road was closed. Our friends who were already at the lake could not get out because of the travel restrictions.
Our plans shifted. Instead of heading there, we went on to Missoula. When we drove by Rock Creek Lodge, I craned my neck to see what was happening at the Testicle Festival. I didn’t see anyone, but I did see the tower set up for the Wet T-shirt and Hairy Chest contests. No one was around that I could tell. Another friend said the area had been evacuated. I didn’t see any more fires like we saw a few days before across the highway and a mile or so away. We did see a hawk on top of one telephone pole and a bald eagle on another one close to where the land was scorched black.
The smoke smell and overcast sky definitely say something is going on. When I stepped out of a grocery store in Missoula Sunday evening, the smell of smoke was fierce and the sky was light grey. The haze is helped along by the fires. In Philipsburg, there was more trouble with ash. Saturday night the tables we were eating at outside were speckled with it.
I keep thinking how awful this must be for people with breathing problems. We’ve also be thinking about our friends who are stuck at Holland Lake. We almost went up there on Saturday. If we had, we’d be stuck right along with them.
Here’s a Web site InciWeb: Incident Information System that tracks the current fires in Montana and other states. It provides details about how many acres the fires cover and how much of the fires are contained. In Montana not much is under control.
