Contents

  1. Preface
  2. San Francisco
  3. Amsterdam
  4. Amsterdam, Helmond
  5. Amsterdam, Zandvoort, Haarlem
  6. Amsterdam, Bruges
  7. Bruges, Brussels, Cologne, Berlin
  8. Berlin
  9. Berlin, Potsdam
  10. Berlin, Wansee
  11. Berlin, Prague
  12. Prague
  13. Prague, Karlstejn, Vienna
  14. Vienna
  15. Vienna, Salzburg, Füssen
  16. Füssen, Neuschwanstein, Munich
  17. Munich, Innsbruck
  18. Innsbruck
  19. Innsbruck, Zürich, Lauterbrunnen
  20. Lauterbrunnen, Jungfraujoch
  21. Lauterbrunnen, Schilthorn
  22. Lauterbrunnen, Spiez, Zermatt
  23. Zermatt
  24. Zermatt, Martigny, Chamonix
  25. Chamonix, Mont Blanc
  26. Chamonix, Mont Blanc, Courmayeur, Aosta, Turin
  27. Barcelona
  28. Barcelona, Sitges
  29. Barcelona
  30. Milan, Venice
  31. Venice
  32. Venice
  33. Venice, Milan, Cinque Terre
  34. Cinque Terre, La Spezia
  35. Cinque Terre, Pisa, Lucca, Florence
  36. Florence
  37. Florence
  38. Florence, Siena
  39. Siena, San Gimignano, Rome
  40. Rome
  41. Rome
  42. Rome, Sorrento
  43. Sorrento, Vesuvius, Pompeii
  44. Sorrento, Positano, Amalfi, Ravello
  45. Sorrento, Capri, Naples
  46. Naples, Bari
  47. Patras, Athens, Mykonos
  48. Mykonos
  49. Mykonos
  50. Mykonos, Paros, Santorini
  51. Santorini
  52. Santorini, Athens
  53. Athens
  54. Athens, Amsterdam, San Francisco


Prev :: Friday, 2 September 2005 :: Next

1. San Francisco

Photo Gallery

The first day of a seven-week sabbatical through Europe! I departed from SFO at 16:00 on KLM 606. The BART extension makes it easy to get from my home on Church St to the airport in half an hour, but such a massive trip requires so much planning that I did end up right down to the wire, running the four blocks from my house with suitcase in tow to catch the train. On the plane next to me was an interesting Dutch woman who has lived in Eureka, CA for many years, from whom I learned about the experiences of the Dutch people at attempting to keep the North Sea out of their low country. Holland was hit by some fierce storms in the 1950s, which was topical as of course Katrina had just obliterated much of New Orleans over the previous few days.

Speaking of hurricanes, I had quite expected a major geopolitical calamity to interfere with my trip! Two historical precedents for that: I flew to China for a three-week vacation on 15 Sept 2001 (enough said), and I visited Thailand in April 2003, just after the start of the Iraq invasion and at the height of the SARS epidemic (with only a handful of cases in Thailand, its major effect was simply to scare away all the other tourists, which from my point of view was really quite nice). So it only works in odd years — nothing much happened in 2002 (Japan) nor 2004 (bike trip from Lhasa to Kathmandu). Now, a few months earlier, I had actually considered checking out the Southern Decadence party this year in New Orleans, which is at Labor Day. So whoever sets up these disasters didn't receive the update on my travel plans, apparently. Lucky for me, not so lucky for New Orleans.

I had an open-jaw ticket, non-stop to Amsterdam (about 10 hours) and then returning from Athens with a stop in Amsterdam, for about $1000. With this exception, everything I looked at involving Athens (including the normally cheap flights within Europe on Ryan Air, Easy Jet, etc.) was exorbitantly expensive, so I suppose this was a good deal. The service on the segment from Athens to Amsterdam (4 hours) was excellent; the others unremarkable. And given the major problems I had with the ticket (see also 24 October), I really can't recommend the airline. I printed out a boarding pass online about 24 hours early, and having acquired a seat I was armed with a confidence which proved entirely false. It turned out that the Northwest and KLM systems were not communicating, with the result that someone else was already in my seat, and of course the flight was badly over-booked (this seems to be a general property of KLM flights). So I could have had a free ticket, but I just wanted to go — and for some reason it took considerable arm twisting before I got them to agree to ask for volunteers, but then at the last minute it turned out there had been one remaining empty seat all along. So I dashed on without a ticket stub or anything (and having given them by printed boarding pass, an important detail later on in the story). Onboard, stuck in a middle seat (but at least the neighbors were not large), I watched Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby, which I had meant to see for some time, and a bit of Ab Fab, which is always a lot of fun.

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