Category Archives: Travel

Should you check your bag?

My travel advice used to be to pack using a carry-on size bag, but then check it so you don’t have to deal with it at the airport or have to worry about space in the overhead bins on the plane. I’ve had to fine-tune this advice.

London — October 2022

For my first international trip since the Covid shutdown, I was heading to the Netherlands for a few days of meetings. I decided to extend the trip a bit by taking a two-day detour on the way to visit my daughter, Laura, in London.

Airport gate greetings, actually

Back in the olden days, the NYC skyline featured the two towers and 9/11 was simply an obnoxious fraction and not the source of so much fear and dismay. Many things in our world changed as a result of 9/11, and one of them was the erasure of airport gate greetings.

Post-travel Covid safety measures

We have always lived in a world in which being around other people involves risk of catching something: a cold, the flu. But now that Covid is in the world, the chances of catching something are higher and the ramifications are potentially worse.

St. Louis, Missouri – November 2021

Another November, another Supercomputing show. Over the last 12 years, always in the week prior to Thankgiving, I’d worked at this show rotating between a small number of cities each year: Dallas, New Orleans, Seattle, Denver, and a few other US cities. Last year the show was entirely virtual due to Covid concerns, but this year — for… Read More »

Traveling with a pillow

In the film Up in the Air, George Clooney’s character teaches Anna Kendrick’s newbie character how to travel, and he puts her travel neck pillow and the full-size bed pillow she’s brought with her into a nearby trash bin. But I say there are three valid reasons why you might need your pillow.