June 04, 2004
Booked
I don't know why I always procrastinate this sort of thing so much, given that I feel so much better after I get it done. Anyway, I finally booked my Great World Tour for July---I'm taking the train from Chicago to Boston on the 8th-9th, then hanging out there for a week, flying from Boston to Barcelona via Amsterdam (yay KLM!) on the 18th-19th, and then flying from Barcelona to Chicago (again via Amsterdam) on the 29th. KLM is totally my hero: the other airlines were quoting me prices in the thousands for every possible configuration involving Chicago and/or Boston and Madrid and/or Barcelona, and significantly more if those configurations were not a straight-up round trip. Not KLM though! My BOS-BCN-ORD trip came in under $900 including tax. And the train trip is only $85, too.
I still have to reserve the car rental I plan to do in Boston, but that's less vital. I also need to actually register for the conference, but that's totally not time sensitive as long as it's done in the next week---the prices aren't randomly fluctuating and there's no worry of being closed out.
It's also an incredibly good thing I idly mentioned to my mom that I needed to find my passport. She suggested I check my safety deposit box, which was of course exactly where it was (and remains), but I had totally forgotten about that. I would have torn the apartment completely apart looking for the damn thing.
Anyway, so anyone who will be in Barcelona or some plausibly nearby locale in Spain or France around that time should let me know. My conference is the 22nd--26th, and the rest of the time I'm bumming around looking at churches and museums and stuff, but I'd love to actually hang out with someone if possible.
"What's going to be awesome is what (if any) culture emerges on Mars. The combination of "you must be this familiar with the utility of educated action to enter" and "the environment is seriously trying to kill you" will weed out a lot of the libertarian and fundie bullshit that's holding us back right now." --Michael Kimmitt
Posted by blahedo at 7:03pm on 4 Jun 2004