We’re now in the final throes of getting ready for the next expedition of The Traveling Richters. We depart Bonaire on Friday, April 18th on a five week journey which will take us to Spain and then Morocco.

We start in Spain in Barcelona for several days (which including meeting up with our friend Martin and his father), then fly to Granada to see the Alhambra. We then rent a car, drive south to the mountains of Andalusia to stay at villas managed by Peter, an old friend from Bonaire. We’ll use his place as a base to visit Gibraltar for a day, and then when we leave, go via Ronda to then spend several days in Sevilla before flying south.

In Morocco we join up with a group as part of a Lindblad Expeditions tour which includes academic lectures on culture, history, and sociology, as well as hands on work with a National Geographic photographer.

After a few days in Marrakech and the Atlas mountains visiting with Berber tribes, we board the National Geographic Endeavour in Safi, visit Kenitra and some historical sites there, and then head up to spend three days learning about Portugal (including the making of port wine) and then visit the largest and most revered cathedral and third most visited Christian pilgrimage site at Santiago de Compostella.

Then, after a couple of days at sea, we will go to Mont St. Michel off the northern coast of France, then Sark in the Channel Islands the next day, before finally arriving in England. After a private tour with the curator of the HMS Victory, we spend three days in London. On the night of May 13th, we take part in a BonaireTalk mini-meet in Surrey - if you’re in the London area that night and want to join us, drop a note on BonaireTalk.

On May 15th, courtesy of the TGV high speed train and the Chunnel, we head to Paris to finish off our trip with non-stop tours of museums, galleries, and restaurants. Our friends Martin and Angela will join us over the weekend we’re there as well.

And, assuming flights all work out, we’ll be back home sometime on May 23rd!

The itinerary, by date, is here.

Okay, so I’ve not been exactly my wordy self on any of my blogs. As usual, life, and more specifically work, got in the way. I spent the last two months in San Diego as a testifying technical expert in a patent trial - my first such trial. Fascinating experience, but not one I expect to repeat anytime soon.

But that’s a different subject. The purpose of this post is to express my pleasant surprise at an e-mail I just received from American Airlines a few minutes ago:

April 8, 2008
Dear Mr. Richter:

We know that you expect on-time departures and arrivals and there is no question that light delays are disruptive and frustrating. We are sorry for the interruption of
your travel plans on March 31.

Although we cannot guarantee our schedules because of the many variables associated with airline operations, we would like to offer a goodwill gesture as an apology and to encourage you to fly with us again. I have added 4,000 miles to your AAdvantage® account. You will shortly see the miles posted to your account at
www.AA.com/AAdvantage.

Please also remember that our first responsibility to you is your safety. We will delay, cancel, reroute, or divert a flight in order to keep this commitment, even if it brings inconvenience. We appreciate your understanding of this promise.

Thank you for traveling on American. We look forward to serving you again soon.

Sincerely,

B. J. Russell
Customer Relations
American Airlines

This was completely unexpected, which is what makes it such a pleasant surprise. Usually one only gets a “reward” of points like this after filing a complaint, but this was a spontaneous offer. It’s unusual in my experience for any travel-related business to be proactive in this way. Kudos American Airlines! Especially as I am only a mere Platinum flyer - I lost my Executive Platinum status because I did not fly enough on American last year.

The back story:

On March 31st, I was attempting to fly home from an overnight in Washington, D.C., to find my flight from DC to Miami an hour late (which was still actually okay, but quite tight). But when I arrived in Miami, I found my connection to San Juan to be an additional two and a half hours late, meaning I would miss my connection to Bonaire (it ultimately turned out the flight was over four hours late, but I had made plans to overnight in Miami and fly to Curacao the next morning). The folks at the American Airlines Admiral’s Club gave me a hotel certificate for the MIA Airport Hotel (the one right at Terminal E) and a couple of negligible food vouchers ($10 for dinner, and $5 for breakfast). Much to my surprise, the hotel was a real pit - closet-like rooms, in serious need of repair, but that wasn’t American’s fault - they were trying to do me a favor and have me stay nearby. I ended up paying for a night at the nearby Sofitel Miami (much nicer but at a price) and getting some work done too as well as a very good night’s rest (something which would not have happened at the MIA Airport Hotel).

The previous post about the U.S. Immigration computers ended on a high note, but it was a false alarm. The nationwide system did not come back on-line. Instead, Immigration officers brought out notebook computers and processed us using those, so at least the line started moving.

But while in line to get processed, I received a text message from American Airlines that my 2:30pm flight to Boston was canceled. I am now booked for a later flight, and protected on an alternate route via JFK & LaGuardia which will still get me to Boston in time for my orthodontist appointment tomorrow morning. For the uninitiated, being “protected” is something offered to higher level frequent flyers in that the airline will block seats on an alternate routing in case the first routing fails to work out. Nice service - but I don’t know if I will retain that next year as I will not requalify for American’s Executive Platinum status - I only just made regular Platinum (and the rest of the family are all Gold-level fliers with American).

Then there will be a question of whether (or perhaps “weather”) or not my orthodontist will even be open tomorrow due to the results of the inclement weather in Boston.

In any event, keep your fingers crossed…

UPDATE: I actually made it to Boston, just a few hours late.

Uploading on a slow and expensive satellite connection isn’t great, but at least it works.

Click here for a view of the photos from Day 3 of our Pacific Journey.

We also have five days at sea, so the kids will be doing school work, Linda hopes to do some painting, and I plan on getting this blog up to date with photos and stories. Oh, and of course, visiting the on-board spa for additional inspiration.

Day 3 of our Pacific Journey We started the day off with a delightful breakfast at the Tart restaurant at our hotel, checked out leaving our armada of luggage in storage, and walked to Beverly Center, a shopping mall in Beverly Hills. There, Linda got her right ear re-pierced (graphic photo here). We followed up with lunch at P.F. Chang’s, where the ambiance was apparently so mellow the kids could not stay awake and both sprawled into slumber on the bench we sat on.

This is a good time to point out that our general rule when it comes to choosing dining establishments when traveling is that we avoid fast food as best we can, and we try to avoid chain restaurants too. Instead we try and pick something interesting and when possible, reflective of local culture and cuisine. However, at times, we’re left with having to chose between the lesser of evils, and such was the case here. Don’t get me wrong. We actually really enjoy P.F. Chang’s, but had there been another sit-down restaurant nearby which wasn’t a chain, and offered good variety, we would have chosen that instead.

After rousing the kids enough out of their slumber to get them to eat something, we took leftovers with us, grabbed a cab back to the hotel, and met up with our driver Gennady again. He took us to LAX for our flight to Tahiti on Air Tahiti Nui. Check-in was smooth, even with all the luggage we had, although attempts to wangle an upgrade to business class proved unsuccessful (not enough seats and they wanted too much money).

Let me pause here to say that rarely have we seen flight crew more attractive, and more attractively dressed than those for Air Tahiti Nui. All were slender - men and women alike - with beautiful faces, and vivid uniforms reminiscent of elegant Hawaiian shirts (or more appropriately, Tahitian shirts). In flight, the woman changed from formal jacket and skirts into flowing, flowery muumuus, and almost glided down the aisles. Simply graceful and stunning. Sadly we did not get any photos of these icons of the sky. U.S. airline flight attendants could certainly learn a thing or two from those on our Air Tahiti Nui flight.

After seven and a half hours in flight in the sardine section of the plane, we arrived safely and almost uneventfully at Papeete (pronounced “Pah-peh-eh-the”)’s Faaa (pronounced “Fah-ah”) airport on Tahiti. I say “almost” uneventfully because I suffered a major eating mishap - I managed to spill my entire hot dinner dish of chicken in glutinous sauce into my lap. Cleaning up was a challenge, but my appetite was assuaged by the leftovers from P.F. Chang’s. Fortunately we brought those (and did not have them challenged by TSA as a dangerous substance) aboard with us.

After landing, it was another half hour in line for immigration and then a few minutes collecting our array of bags and we were out of the corridors of foreign entry bureaucracy and getting lei’d. The lei-er was a young woman by the name of “Center”, also known as Lily, and the leis were wonderfully fragrant and oddly reinvigorating. She brought us to the large van the hotel had arranged for us, at even though she was petite, measuring just a bit north of five feet in height, she could haul heavy luggage with the best of them. In fact, she was offended when I gallantly offered to put the bags in the van myself instead of her.

A 20 minute ride later, and we were at the Le Meridien hotel in Punaauia (no recollection on how that’s pronounced, but it’s not as an English speaker would remotely expect), and shortly thereafter in our connecting rooms with a combined pool and ocean view (although viewing any significant part of the ocean required a minor acrobatic feat - one of potential injury - on the balcony). The rooms were spacious, with nice bathrooms offering a separate tub and shower, but the beds were too soft.

Considering we had just lost another three hours due to the time zone (GMT-10, no daylight savings observed) and it was around 11pm local time (making it 5am Bonaire time) we were wiped out, and crashed almost as soon as we turned off the lights.

Thus ends Day 3 of our Pacific Journey.

I’ll provide a separate post with links to photos once we find a decent enough Internet connection to upload them.

Day 1 of our Pacific Journey - Bonaire to Los Angeles

As the post prior to this one indicates, we started our journey from Bonaire yesterday morning on time. Our visiting friends Martin and Angela saw us off (they are staying at our house for the next week), and we flew with another long time friend, Darlene.

We checked eight pieces of checked luggage for this trip (three of those are stuffed with dive gear for the four of us), and also have the full load of eight carry-ons - four wheeled carry-ons, and four shoulder bags or back-packs. That’s a lot of stuff.

But check-in was no problem on Bonaire. It never has been if you show up early enough.

We had a very tight connection in San Juan due to a schedule change, but thanks to our frequent flyer status and business class upgrades we got to go into the express security line in San Juan and we just barely made our flight. Amazingly, our bags made it to Los Angeles with us, although problems with the baggage delivery system delayed us a bit as well.

We had prearranged with Prime Limousine Service to pick us up in a large SUV to accommodate all the luggage we had, and our driver Gennady managed to just barely squeeze us and our bags into the Escalade he brought to the airport for us. Gennady, an immigrant from Ukraine, was a nice chatty fellow, and curious about Bonaire and living in the Caribbean.

Our Hotel

We arrived at the Farmer’s Daughter Hotel in early evening, and got settled into our two rooms - the kids in one, and the adults in the adjacent one. Things work better that way, we’ve found.

The hotel is located a few minute walk from the famous Farmers Market in Los Angeles, and thus also near The Grove shopping area, and we’ve been told that it’s the preferred hotel for contestants on the TV game show, The Price is Right, which is taped at the CBS Studios right across the street.

The Farmer’s Daughter hotel is a bit funky and kitschy, and features an interesting looking restaurant/bar called Tart (we’ll have dinner there tonight). The rooms are comfortable, but spartan. And as we discovered, even though we had reservations for connecting rooms, there were no such rooms at the hotel at all. But we did manage to get adjacent rooms. The front desk staff was friendly, but there was no bell staff to speak of, so we had a lot of luggage moving to do ourselves once we found a luggage cart. Not a problem, but it did delay our getting to our rooms a bit.

After settling in and opening the FedEx boxes waiting for us (one was a color proof of the forthcoming 2008 Richter Art Calendar and the others for Linda’s new Sony Reader - more on the latter later), we headed out to explore dinner options.

Dining Out - Japanese Cusine

We settled on a place called Kado, which offered regular dining on one side and a conveyor belt sushi delivery system on the other. We opted for the conveyor belt sushi side, as we could get fed more quickly that way, and because the other side was loud and noisy with various actors and Hollywood types (Bas saw an actor he recognized from one of the shows he watches) at some sort of shindig.

The food at Kado was quite good, but service was a bit sketchy - many of the waiters and waitresses seemed a bit distracted by the gathering at the other side of the restaurant in the lounge.

Winding Down

After dinner we wandered over to the party supply store across the way to scout out Halloween gear for use on Halloween aboard the cruise ship. We actually have no idea if there will be anything remotely like Halloween celebrated on the cruise, though. We did not buy anything last night, but did study the options, and ended up buying costumes and accessories today.

After a quick stop for soft serve ice cream in Farmers Market, we retired to our rooms for the night and watched a couple of episodes of Smallville, Season 1 with the kids off the DVDs we had brought with us to distract them with. It should be noted that the rooms here at the Farmer’s Daughter Hotel are equipped with good sized flat screens and DVD players - an added bonus as far as we’re concerned, since watching such movies on the small 8″ portable DVD player is a challenge for four people.

That ends Day 1 of our journey.

Photos documenting the day’s travels and explorations can be found here in our Photo Gallery.