Recorded in the Philadelphia Marriott after a hectic travel month with two trips to Europe and a bunch of travel up and down the US East Coast. In this episode, I talk about a bit of multi-modal travel — some planes, trains, and automobile trips. We have a trio of stories about playing “travel roulette” to avoid flight delays, and some listeners offer their favorite iPhone apps. I then share some non-obvious, intermediate-skill travel tips — a sort of Road Warrior 201-level class and close with some thoughts about enjoying the fall colors from up above. Here’s a direct link to the podcast file.
Autumn is the only time I willingly book a window seat. Today’s approach into Newark had us flying over the Delaware Water Gap on a clear sunny day. The leaves are beginning to change — I saw dots of yellow and orange and red bursting out of a field of green. It made me reach back for into some old neurons for the word “pointillism“, which I learned on a grade-school field trip to the Art Institute of Chicago standing in front of Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte“.
I don’t take the window on every Fall flight. It’s only a Northeast/Upper Midwest thing. You need maples for those vibrant colors. The oaks down South are more brown than bright. And the tree breaks that Plains farmers plant between their crop fields aren’t wide enough, aren’t broad enough to fill your field of view with color.
Even in the Northeast and Upper Midwest, not every airport serves up the colors. I’ll always take a window flying in and out of White Plains/Westchester County (HPN) and Detroit (DTW). However, the eastern approaches into Milwaukee and Chicago over Lake Michigan — usually among my favorites — don’t do anything for me in Autumn. It’s often said that Fall colors are Nature’s way of paying us for the dreariness of Winter. For those of us flying, perhaps it’s a way to pay us forward for the snow delays we know we’ll start living through after those leaves fall.
Mika Pyyhkala, a long time TravelCommons listener who works for the National Federation of the Blind of Massachusetts, dropped me a note about a problem he recently had with some new technology installed in New York City cabs.
“I was in NYC last Sunday and I took a taxi from La Guardia airport to mid town Manhattan. I noticed that the credit card payment terminal is a touch screen visual-only interface. The taxi driver had to get into the back seat to read and operate the system for me — I could not tell what was on the screen. You cannot just swipe the card; you have to press the touch screen a number of times to initiate and complete the transaction, including pressing an area to select your tip amount. The driver told me the tip options were 20% or 25%, but I am sure it also has an option for 15%.”
There’s an uncomfortable situation — trusting your cab driver to select his own tip before he’s pulled your luggage from his trunk. I’ve used these credit card terminals and they’re one of the worst payment interfaces I’ve experienced — a complete pain for someone with good eyesight. I’ve stayed with cash ever since. Mika’s note, however, suggests a challenge to the travel industry’s broader moves toward self-service. As airlines and hotels work to move more transactions to touch screen kiosks at the same time as an aging population’s eyesight dims, good accessibility design will become critical to the success of these self-service initiatives — a lot more important than a pleasing color palette.
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